


Face On

by AndyAO3



Series: Angry Marshmallows and Sad Robots [5]
Category: Fallout (Video Games), Fallout 3
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Disabled Lone Wanderer, M/M, Sad Robots, Slow Build
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-27
Updated: 2016-02-08
Packaged: 2018-04-11 15:09:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 27
Words: 75,554
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4440620
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AndyAO3/pseuds/AndyAO3
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The vault kid's definition of logic seems to be unique to him alone.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. prologue: don't bother none

**Author's Note:**

> I feel like I've been badgered into writing this one down. A lot of people were going WRITE THE SAD ROBOTS, ANDY. So I am. I am writing sad robots. Fuck me sideways.
> 
> Beta by potionsmaster @ AO3, who is a dirty enabler. I don't know where this is going, but it's definitely... going. Somewhere.
> 
> Note: I have not actually required much badgering to start writing this. Mostly because I like robots way too much to NOT give it a go.
> 
> **EDIT: IF YOU WANT SMUT, IT'S IN CHAPTER 26 AND IT'S PRETTY TAME. HOPE YOU DON'T MIND THE SLOW BURN, KIDDOS.**

It was late. Harkness couldn't tell how late, though he'd put the time right around midnight at a guess. The sky was remarkably clear, the moon a pale crescent standing out sharply against the endless black abyss of space. Light pollution from the rusted hulk of a carrier was enough to make the stars hard to see - even from where he stood out on the flight deck - but it wasn't enough to blot out the moon.

But then again, he'd never been much of a poet. So all he could think of was how the low light sapping the color from everything made the world seem a hell of a lot colder at night than he remembered.

Maybe it _was_ colder. Or maybe he was just looking at the past through - what was the saying? - rose-tinted lenses, seeing it as nicer than it had actually been. He wasn't sure. Wasn't sure of much of anything, not anymore. He'd been told it might be a side-effect of spending so much time in cryo. Something about cells not quite thawing right sometimes if they'd been frozen for too long and the ice crystals had pierced the cell walls. The doc he'd spoken to (Pinkerton, right?) had compared it to freezerburn.

The mental comparison of his brain to a hunk of frozen beef made him shudder. It also had him wishing for a cigarette, but he was trying to give that particular bad habit up. Not like they were manufacturing them anymore after all, and home-rolled ones just weren't the same.

His ex-wife would probably laugh at him for that one. Gotta have those authentic carcinogens, huh?

Damn. He'd been trying not to think about her.

"Hey, Chief," a voice said. Harkness heard the door to the security tower open, then slide shut again with the heavy sound of grinding gears. He didn't look away from the sky; he didn't have to. He knew that voice. It'd been nagging him on-and-off for days.

"Bit late for a stroll, Davies," Harkness replied, sounding as tired as he felt.

Ted Davies always made him feel tired, like the anticipation alone was enough to exhaust him. Because Ted Davies was trouble dressed in a ragged Vault 101 jumpsuit, like his purpose in life was to give Harkness shit. "Eh, needed to clear my head," the kid said, only making it a few more steps before he seemed to decide that plopping down on the cold flight deck was preferrable to standing. "Besides, sunlight and I don't get along so well."

"Right." Harkness could see why, with the kid having all the color of a white lab rat. Still, Davies' presence put him on edge; he'd already had to throw the kid off the ship twice for brawling. "Doesn't explain why you're up here. Is there a problem?"

"What, you don't trust me?" He could hear the Vaultie's grin in his voice. "I'm hurt, Chief. That's pretty cold of you."

No, Harkness didn't trust him. Not one damn bit. "You didn't answer the question."

Davies chuckled. "Hah. Well, shit. I can't fool you for long, can I?" Underneath them, the ship creaked and groaned as it shifted; noises that Harkness was fairly used to by that point, but a startled gasp from Davies told him that the Vaultie wasn't so lucky.

"It's just the ship," Harkness assured. "It does that."

"Yeah, I know." The kid didn't sound convinced. Harkness glanced back and saw that he'd planted both hands on the deck just in case, glaring distrustfully at the cold steel beneath him.

"Still didn't answer my question."

The Vaultie shot Harkness a dirty look. "I _know_."

"You going to?"

"I'm getting to it," Davies said. But with something else to focus on, he did seem to relax somewhat. "Look, it's just-- I'm trying to figure out how to word this, alright?"

Great. That meant it was something that would probably piss Harkness off. "Lay it on me."

Davies gave him this weird stare for a minute. "Alright," the Vaultie eventually replied. "So, there's this person. Uh, an escaped slave, I guess."

"On my ship?" Harkness bristled. The whole idea of slavery just bugged him; he'd be more than willing to help out. But then again, it'd probably mean stepping up security. More drills. Restocking the armory. Maybe they could get the Steelers to part with some heavier ordnance?

"Don't get any ideas, man. Their identity's been wiped." Davies broke eye contact to stare at his boot, poking idly at a crack in the leather. "That's kinda the dilemma I'm having, see. Their memories have been wiped. They think they're someone else."

Harkness frowned hard. "How would you even manage that?"

"Doesn't matter. Point is, they don't know, so they can't do anything about it. To make things worse, one of the slavers after them is already on board."

"Bullshit. I wouldn't let someone like that on my ship." The conversation had started to piss him off. "In fact, you tell me who the bastard is and I'll throw them overboard right now."

Davies cringed, like he'd been afraid of that answer. "Dude, even I know we don't need a full-scale war with these assholes."

"Rivet City can handle all of Paradise Falls if it has to," Harkness insisted.

"This is bigger than Paradise Falls. Better tech, definitely. Think of the Brotherhood, except even smarter." The Vaultie sighed and rubbed at his eyes. "Look, Chief. I've been given a way to get the slave's memories and identity back. With that, you guys can fight back better if you have to. You'll know all these guys' methods and weaknesses. But it'll be hell on the escaped slave, y'know? They'll remember everything. _Everything_."

"So?"

"So, I'm not sure I can make that call."

"Then don't," Harkness answered firmly. "It's my ship, I'll make the call."

When the Vaultie looked up, his expression was unreadable. Not because it was cold, but rather due to just how little sense it made in context. "You're sure?" The way he said it almost sounded like... God, Harkness couldn't even say for certain. It was like there was another question behind the one he was actually asking.

It all went towards making Harkness that much more certain. Whatever this thing was, it needed to be done. Not just for the sake of the ship, but for the sake of the one Davies refused to name. Was it Lana? Maybe Vera, or Bannon? Someone important enough that the Vault kid didn't want to hurt them directly with the life they'd buried.

Slavers. Shit. Even knowing he didn't have all the information, Harkness was sure that whoever it was would be better off knowing what was after them.

"Yeah, I am." Harkness met the kid's gaze. "Do it."

Davies sucked in a breath. Let it out slow as he heaved himself up to stand. Straightened out his jumpsuit with a slow nod. "Okay," he said. His voice cracked slightly in the middle of the word; it struck Harkness just how young the kid must be. Eighteen? Nineteen? Early twenties at most. Whatever age he was, his lack of height and the oversized jumpsuit did nothing to make him look any older.

He wasn't ready for responsibility, not really. Not yet. "If they've got a problem with it, tell whoever it is that I'm the one who made the call," Harkness said.

The Vaultie smiled, but it didn't reach his eyes. "Activate A3-21 recall code violet."

 


	2. 1: date of rebirth

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Results inconclusive; not enough data to accurately predict behavior of subject at present.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here we go. First chapter where I'm truly writing a robot instead of a human being. Potionsmaster suggested a minor change or two and I went ahead with them.
> 
> Thank God for proofreaders, amirite.

A few days later - _three days, eight hours, twenty one minutes_ \- Harkness was the one on duty in the marketplace when Zimmer left with his other android in tow. The old bastard didn't so much as glance at Harkness on the way out.

Just a few seconds after the door had shut, a rhythmic tapping noise drew his attention to the balcony; Davies was leaned against the railing up by the pool table, holding a Nuka Cola bottle. He smiled when he caught the security chief's eye and nodded towards the door Zimmer had just left through, giving Harkness a wink.

( _"It's okay, Hark. I'll keep you safe."_ )

Good to know Davies was a man of his word, at least.

The code had brought everything back. Every runner he'd caught, every plea for mercy. Everything he'd ever done for Zimmer, everything done to him. Every buried memory had come back to him, in all their horrible clarity. And when he came back to himself he realized he could put a hexadecimal code to every color he saw, read the decibel levels of every sound, measure distances to a milimeter at a glance, feel temperature and air pressure...

For a few seconds he'd been overwhelmed by it. All the firewalls keeping his system out of sight had been lifted at the same time the ones on his memory had. As a human he wouldn't have known what to do with all of that information. As an android he'd be lost without all that input. Androids didn't have instincts, they had an operating system. They didn't have intuition, they had data.

The data he had upon "waking up" again as A3-21 was that Zimmer was in Rivet City. Had been badgering anyone who would listen about his lost android-- about A3-21. That data was almost enough to make him panic, or whatever the android equivalent was.

Except Davies had grabbed him by the shoulders and told him to calm the fuck down. Assured him it'd get taken care of. A3-21 had believed him; to be fair, Davies hadn't technically told a single lie yet. Not since he'd come on board.

So far, events had yet to make a liar out of the Vaultie. The human side of Harkness would've probably noted that there was something almost sad about the only thing standing between him and slavery being a reedy little albino kid fresh out of a Vault, but he wasn't human. Not really. He was a machine.

Though if nothing else, being human had given him enough of a frame of reference to know that this new feeling he'd discovered was called "gratitude". That was something.

"Chief-- hey, Chief!" Fingers snapped in front of his face and he blinked. Lana Danvers was standing in front of him, her lips pursed with annoyance. "God, you're so out of it lately." He hadn't noticed. Well, no. He'd noticed. He'd just filed the information away as not being a priority.

His gaze drifted back to the balcony for a fraction of a second, but Davies had left. Probably gone the moment he'd confirmed that his wordless message was received. Right. "There a problem, Danvers?" Harkness asked. Because he was still Harkness to the people of Rivet City; they still needed him to be head of security, and he wasn't about to reveal what he was to the whole world.

"Might be soon," Danvers replied. "Passed Flak on his way down to the Muddy Rudder, and he didn't have Shrapnel with him. Seemed like he was in in one helluva mood."

A fight waiting to happen. Harkness felt some relief at the familiarity of it. "Tell Preston to be ready with some stims. I'll be down there as soon as my post is covered."

Back to work.

\---

Flak didn't end up taking a dip in the river, but Sister and Tammy Hargrave both did. It wasn't that Flak hadn't fought like a cornered animal, he'd just come out of it having taken such a beating from Sister that the river water would probably lead to something getting infected. Shrapnel showed up at Doctor Preston's door approximately twelve minutes after Flak did, spitting obscenities while Preston stitched up a glowering, bloody Flak.

Apparently, someone had let slip to the two of them that Sister was a slaver. Tammy had only gotten involved because her drink had been knocked over.

Neither Flak nor Shrapnel wanted to let Sister back on board. Harkness couldn't find any fault with their logic in that regard, but he also knew that leaving the man out in the Wastes with nothing but the clothes on his back would be sentencing him to death by super mutants.

Or mirelurks. Or yao guai. Or whatever else decided it was hungry that day. Throwing him in the water meant that even if he'd had a gun on him, the powder in it would be soaked clean through; Harkness doubted Sister could afford a waterproof holster. And a knife wouldn't be nearly enough to keep him safe this far into the inner city.

So in the end, Harkness had to let Sister back onto the ship. He just made sure his guards knew to keep an eye on the guy.

There was no doubt in the security chief's mind as to who had gotten ahold of that information and told Flak and Shrapnel about it in the first place. A maneuver like that was strategic. Guaranteed to spark conflict. Only one person who'd been on the ship of late had both the disposition and the brains to even think of it, let alone try it.

Davies found his way back to Rivet City the next day - _one day, six hours, seven minutes_ since he'd last been spotted there, Harkness' system informed him - with a sack full of scavenged junk. It was towards the end of Harkness' marketplace shift when the kid came in, the armor strapped to the outside of his Vault 101 jumpsuit looking as ragged as the jumpsuit itself.

He didn't give the security chief more than a curt nod as he went by, barely even paying attention to his surroundings; when Harkness caught his arm, it startled him enough to make him squawk and jerk away. "The fuck? Let go, asshole--"

Harkness didn't let go. "Why didn't you tell me about Sister?"

Davies looked up, staring openly for zero-point-eight seconds before he could school his expression into a frown. "Middle of the marketplace? Seriously, man?"

"If you wanted to keep it a secret, you shouldn't have told Flak and Shrapnel." Word had gotten around fast that Rivet City had a slaver on board. A black mark like that made Sister more of a pariah than he already had been; people were avoiding him like the plague. "You should have told me."

"It's more complicated than that," Davies said irritably. "There are other people involved, and I'm not gonna endanger them when I don't have to."

When, not if. Davies was certain that Harkness would back down. He wasn't wrong, either. Two more seconds of deliberation and Harkness let go of the Vaultie's arm. "Fine." Damn if the kid didn't know just how to make logic work in his favor. "Flight deck, after hours. You're going to tell me just what the hell you were thinking. If I don't like it, I'm throwing you overboard. I won't let you back on. Is that clear?"

Davies rubbed at his arm, cringing. He wasn't meeting the security chief's gaze, instead glaring sullenly at the floor. There'd probably be a bruise where Harkness had gripped him. "Yes, sir." There was an emphasis on the word _sir_ , like the word was an insult. To him, it probably was.

Harkness nodded, straightening his posture into something that looked more alert. "As you were, Davies."

One secret, Davies had kept. Another secret had been made public in such a way that it couldn't get much worse than it already had. Harkness needed to know the parameters of what made a secret worth keeping, and what made it worth spreading around.

He watched Davies go back to haggling over how many stims he could get in exchange for a salvaged mini-nuke with an intact casing, and wondered at just how safe he really was.

\---

"After hours" to Harkness meant "after the marketplace closed". To Davies, it apparently meant "after midnight".

The kid showed up at _0037_. "Hey Chief. Been waiting long?" he asked, making sure the door to the control tower was firmly closed behind him without actually slamming it. Like he was used to heavy doors like that. Probably was, considering he was a Vaultie.

"Four hours, twenty-two minutes," Harkness replied.

"Hah." The Vaultie tucked his hands behind his head and smirked. The armor had been stripped off of his vault suit; Harkness assumed Davies had left it in the room Vera had set him up in. "Man, if you wanna look human, you gotta use estimates. Make it sound like a rough guess, y'know?"

"I did. Rounded it to the nearest minute."

"Try the nearest hour next time," Davies advised. Much like the last time he'd come up to join Harkness on the flight deck, it wasn't long before the Vaultie was plopped cross-legged on the deck, fidgeting with his Pip-boy.

It couldn't be more obvious that Davies was from a vault if he were to shout it every time he walked into a room, really. "You going to tell me why I shouldn't throw you off the ship for the stunt you pulled?"

Davies grinned. "Honestly, Chief? If what you want is complete control of the situation, then you've probably got every right to throw me overboard."

"So you did it for the sake of anarchy?" That didn't sound right. Sure, Davies leaned more anarchic than most, but not for no reason. Even knowing the guy for a week, Harkness knew better than to assume that.

"No. But if you don't want chaos, you should get rid of somebody like me. Just saying."

It was true. Davies was a chaotic element. A wrench in the works. Kid caused trouble wherever he went, and yet... And yet. Harkness filed that train of thought away for later and cleared his throat despite not needing to. "Tell me what happened." Back to the topic at hand.

"Just like that, chief?" Davies looked at Harkness like he knew something the security chief didn't. "Alright. That girl, Mei. She's a former slave. Asked me to do something about Sister. She told me about him, so I said I'd go buy her a gun."

"Did you?"

"Well, yeah. I'm not an asshole. Got her a ten mil, easy enough to just point and shoot one of those. While I was at it, I let Flak and Shrap know." The kid shrugged. "That's pretty much how it went."

"You didn't say why you told them about it," Harkness noted.

Davies winced. "Yeah, see? That's where it gets sticky."

"Will it get you thrown overboard?"

"No, it'll just make me look like a manipulative prick who thinks he can play people like harps."

Harkness blinked. Why was that-- Actually, no. He couldn't come up with a logical reason for that statement to be true. He'd known Davies for a week and a half, yet that description didn't come close to applying. "Can you?" he asked after a three-second pause.

"That's not the point." Davies sighed and shifted so that one leg was pulled up to his chest and the other was splayed out in front of him, his foot inches away from the edge of the flight deck.

Harkness thought for a second that the kid might be a bit bow-legged; he pushed the thought aside almost as soon as it came to him. Not enough conclusive data to know. "Then what are you saying?"

"Doesn't matter whether or not I can, Chief. I can. It's easy." Davies ran a hand through his hair, sighed again. "It's just... It's whether or not I actually go through with it, y'know? Like anything. And on principle I avoid that shit."

"But you didn't avoid it with Sister."

"Well... No. No, I didn't. I found a pressure point and I pushed it, because I knew just telling you would be worse for Mei - and any other former slaves that came to Rivet City - than getting everyone on the ass of the guy responsible. You'd want to protect them, and that's fine. Great. But doing that shit would just bring more attention to the ones who're being protected. They'd end up less safe in the long run."

Harkness had to admit that the logic was damn solid. Rivet City had its problems, but its community was almost like a family. It took care of its own. "You're not a manipulative prick," he said. Because that much was even more obvious to him after hearing Davies' reasoning; after all, that implied that Davies would ever manipulate a situation for a reason other than someone's personal safety and agency. Given the data he had, Harkness would say that was statistically implausible.

Davies laughed bitterly at the statement, though. And that made Harkness wonder just how much data he was missing.

 


	3. 2: could you bite the hand

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Empathy is a human thing... Isn't it?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> we gon' do dis shit.
> 
> Characters didn't listen to me. I had a plan for this chapter but they derailed it.

Time passed, and life went on in Rivet City as it always had. There was a little more apprehension in the air - the people were a little more watchful, more nervous than they had been previously - but for several days, nothing of any interest happened in the city. Traders came and went, caps and goods were exchanged.

Six days after the last time Harkness had seen the Vaultie leave, the kid came back. It was during Harkness' shift in the marketplace again; Davies had taken to only coming during the day so that he wouldn't end up in the market too close to closing time. Or so he'd told Harkness, at least. The pack slung over his shoulder looked heavy, probably loaded with guns and ammunition again.

But his grip on the handle was tight. The muscles in his jaw and neck were tense. His shoulders were slightly hunched. And the armor that was strapped to his jumpsuit was more worn and scarred than Harkness had ever seen it, like it was about to fall apart.

His only greeting to Harkness on the way in was a tight little nod before he headed directly for Flak and Shrapnel's stall, swinging the sack of junk over his shoulder to drop it on the counter. It would be routine were it not for the tiny differences in Davies' mannerisms, his posture, his voice as he argued prices.

Harkness was able to conclude fairly quickly that something was wrong. Which meant that Davies, already a rogue element, would be even more unpredictable than usual. Sure, it was possible that nothing would come of it. Harkness doubted that, though.

The solution was simple enough. He only needed to be that much more watchful and on his guard to compensate. With that in mind, Harkness braced himself for a tense afternoon. Hopefully nothing would have gone wrong by the time the evening arrived; if he was lucky, Davies would leave by then and take his trouble with him.

If he was lucky.

The statistical probability of that sort of luck was very, very low.

\---

Hours later - _four hours, fifty-three minutes_ \- Harkness was sitting in his customary spot in the Weatherly hotel lobby and eating dinner as usual. Dinner consisted of mirelurk cakes and a Nuka Cola.

As an android he didn't necessarily need to eat, but he did it anyway to keep up appearances. Sleeping, too. Both activities were slightly more efficient than going into standby mode to recharge, but he could do without them if he had to. He wondered sometimes if he'd bother with them were he not trying to act human. Androids didn't have habits. Habits were a human thing. Coming down to see Vera after his shift was over was expected of him because everyone else had worked him into their habitual behaviors, not the other way around.

However, even if it was routine for their sake, it was still routine. It made him predictable. Easy to find. Not a bad quality for a security chief, because it meant that his men could find him if they needed to.

When he heard footsteps pounding down the corridor towards the lobby, the first thought that came to mind was that it was just such an occassion. That there had been trouble, and he was needed. He set his cutlery down and looked up, ready to move if he had to.

But instead of black combat armor, the figure that came to the door was dressed in a blue jumpsuit.

"Hah!" Davies crowed. The Vaultie's eyes were trained on Harkness from the moment he spotted the security chief in his customary corner. "Knew you'd be here."

Harkness felt something like dread, but could only frown at the Vaultie in return; Vera looked up and gasped, and from there he knew that Davies' attention would be divided for at least another five minutes. "Oh, Teddy! It's so good to see you-- have you come to check on Bryan?"

Davies blinked at her like he'd only just noticed her presence, but his confusion seemed to last for one-point-three seconds before he caught himself and put on a grin for her. "Huh? Oh, hey Vera. Nah, I'm here for the Chief."

"For Harkness?" Vera glanced back with a slight furrow to her brow. "Is it important? Is something wrong?"

"Nothing's wrong, Vera, don't worry." Davies' tone was one of hasty reassurance. "Just wanted to see if the Chief wanted to go on a little trip, that's all. Figure he could use a break." Then he cast a meaningful look in Harkness' direction before leaning over the desk with one hand cupped over his mouth as if he were being secretive. He wasn't. "Guy's been tense lately, y'know?"

"I don't need a break," Harkness said.

Vera waved dismissively. "Quiet, Hark. We're talking." She turned back to Davies. "I think that's a wonderful idea, Ted. You're right, he does need a break." She, too, shot a look at Harkness. "Where would you suggest?"

"Well, Arlington Library's pretty close by. A Steeler's offering me a sweet deal in exchange for any books I can find there, and there's this chick in Megaton who's doing research for a book _she's_ writing. Two birds with one stone, right? Easy enough scavving job."

"Oh, but wouldn't that be dangerous?"

"Puh- _leeease_ , Vera. It's me and the Chief. I'd be more worried for anything we come up against."

Harkness frowned very, very sternly at the both of them. "Don't I get a say in this?"

Vera pressed her lips together, disapproving. "He's right, Harkness. You haven't had a break since you took the job. Not one." She wagged a finger at him. "You'll work yourself to death at this rate."

"Yeah, Chief. Listen to the lady." Davies smirked wickedly. Knowingly. "You're not a machine. People gotta take breaks sometimes."

All Harkness could do was glare at him flatly after a statement like that. Bullshit. The little bastard had trapped him.

And damn if it didn't look like Davies knew it, too; kid looked downright smug.

"I'll tell Lana to have someone cover your shift," Vera soothed. "Go ahead and take a couple of days off, Hark. You've earned it."

There were no words for how annoyed he was at the pair of them.

"I take back what I said."

"Which part, Chief?"

"You're a manipulative prick."

"Hah!" Davies flashed a broad, toothy grin. "See, what'd I tell you?"

\---

They headed out across the drawbridge the next morning at _08:32_. By that point it was only natural that half the ship had found out. Harkness was alarmed to find out how many people agreed with the Vaultie's idea. At how they thought that scavving in the Wastes - even in a relatively calm part of the city where the greatest threat was usually drugged-up raiders - would somehow be more relaxing to him than being the chief of security. Were the people aboard his ship just that divorced from reality?

Davies had managed to fix up the armor-bits strapped to his Vault suit using the remnants of a set of combat armor that had formerly belonged to Rivet City security. The gear in question had long since been abandoned for the scrap heap by Harkness's people, but Davies had somehow made parts of it work for him with a little wonderglue, some belts, and considerable ingenuity.

He was armed with a scoped .44 magnum and a laser pistol. The gun Harkness had entrusted to him was nowhere to be found on his person. Harkness suspected the kid had pawned it.

Right. It was just a gun. It didn't matter. Didn't make sense for him to be annoyed over possessions. Not when they weren't even his anymore.

"Ahh, smell that fresh Capital Wasteland air," Davies said, grinning again. They were a fair distance away from the ship. Past the drawbridge. "Bet your sensors are telling you all kinds of things about shit like oxygen content and all that."

They were. Though Harkness suspected that Davies knew that already, so he didn't dignify the statement with a reply. "Why are we out here?" he asked instead, scanning their surroundings for possible threats. All he saw was broken pavement and even more broken buildings. Maybe the occasional car. Rivet City was behind them.

"Straight to the point like always, huh?" Davies drew the magnum only to twirl it idly with deft fingers. The safety was on. How quickly could he be ready for a fight with his safety on? Harkness had to stay alert. "Let's just say you're not the only one who needed a break."

"Bullshit." The Vaultie was avoiding the question. "That's not good enough. Why drag me into this?"

"Maybe I just enjoy your company. That ever occur to you?" Davies glanced back, but whatever he saw in the security chief's expression seemed to get it through his head that Harkness wasn't in a joking mood. He sighed and holstered his gun again, shaking his head. "Look, Chief. Of anybody I know, you're the one person I figure can take care of themselves without me having to babysit them, alright? So think of this like... I dunno. A trial run, I guess."

That made even less sense. "A trial run of what?"

"Of me not going it alone for once." The kid's voice turned sharp. Cold. "Because I can't. Alright? I _can't_. There, I said it. You fucking happy now, robot?"

Things went silent between them. Harkness remembered the inconsistencies he'd noticed the day before, the tension. There was something very wrong about the way Davies was acting. Something that didn't fit the patterns he'd seen previously.

Davies let out a slow breath. "Sorry. That was-- that was a low blow, there. Didn't mean it the way it sounded."

"I'm not offended," Harkness said. "Why can't you be alone?"

"It's... It's complicated, man." Davies shoved his hands into his pockets and frowned hard at the broken pavement as he walked. "I'm not sure you'd get it-- Hah. Shit, no. That's not right. You might get it a little too well, who knows."

Still dodging the question. Was the answer embarassing? Painful to him in some way? What wouldn't Harkness understand? "You've strong-armed me into taking two days of leave from my ship. I'd like to know why."

The Vaultie stopped in his tracks, kicking at a bit of broken asphault. When he turned around to face Harkness, his eyes were red-rimmed and his brow had furrowed tightly; he was biting his lip hard enough that the security chief thought he might split it.

He looked scared. Vulnerable. To Harkness, it was enough of a change to throw everything he knew about the kid into question.

"You know how Rivet City is, Chief," Davies said finally with a weak smile. "If I'd said 'hey, I was born with a heart defect, so I've got a pacemaker and I should probably have someone with me in case I overdo it' in front of everybody, those assholes'd never let me leave again. They'd say it was for my own damn good, too."

Harkness blinked. Turned the statement over in his mind.

"I've got other options. There's this guy in Megaton, used to be a merc... Yeah. I even found a dog. Out in a scrapyard, y'know? Fucks with my allergies a little bit, but dogs make for a good early warning system." The kid wasn't looking at Harkness. Seemed like he was afraid to. "I know what I'm asking. I know what Rivet City means to you. You don't have to do this, okay? I won't force you. I know I've manipulated you, I know how much of a dick I've been."

Davies was asking for help. Asking _Harkness_. And he was asking in a way that framed the question as the worst offense he'd committed thus far. That was the thing Harkness understood the least. He'd asked for help once himself. Gotten it, too. He'd been afraid to, but the fear had been due to the immense risk that came from exposing himself. Not from... Whatever it was that Davies was afraid of.

The silence wore on for approximately five seconds before Davies slumped with a faint, joyless chuckle. "Heh. Nevermind. Forget I said anything, alright?"

Harkness didn't forget things. "What do I need to watch for?" he asked, and Davies looked up as suddenly as if he'd been struck.

"What?"

"If I'm going to do my job, I need to know what the indicators are of a fault in your system," Harkness said patiently. "Trial run, right? I need that data if I'm going to perform at peak efficiency."

Davies stared. He swallowed heavily. Blinked a few times, shook his head. When he looked up again, he was smiling.

 


	4. 3: the tower of babel

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The answers bring more questions.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here we go, a fluffy apology for last chapter.

Even though he didn't need to, Harkness still went over what Davies had told him in his mind. Sustained elevated heartrate, or irregularities in rhythm; Davies had made sure Harkness knew where all the pulse points were in case he had to check. Shortness of breath. Unusual discoloration. Unexplained aches, not caused by injury.

( _"See my fingers, Chief? See how the tips are swollen? I don't wear gloves 'cause I gotta see what color they are. It's a warning sign if the color changes. My lips turn pale too, like... More than usual. I can see it in a mirror if it happens."_ )

All of it was monitored by Davies' Pip-boy, but Harkness didn't need to have the impracticality of constantly checking the device explained to him.

Why couldn't Davies watch for any of it himself?

( _"I'm stubborn. I'll ignore it or shrug it off. And I've gotten so used to the minor symptoms that're usually false alarms that I don't think about the major ones until they get bad. Real bad. I've only had one close call so far. Like to keep it that way."_ )

One close call. Harkness didn't like what that meant. It was a grim, foul idea. Yet he had half a notion that it wasn't the close call that had scared Davies badly enough for him to admit defeat and come to Harkness for help. The Vaultie was tougher than that. Harkness had seen the kid brawl; before he'd been forcibly dragged out of the Muddy Rudder during one such fight, spitting curses and blood and taunts all the way, he'd been _winning_ against three men who were all bigger and more cruel than he was.

Davies had said that maybe Harkness would understand a little too well, but so far he barely understood any of it. If the grim reaper were more than a baseless human superstition, Ted Davies would probably kick its ass back into Hell rather than let it take him. It wasn't fear of death that drove the Vaultie onward. So what was it?

"Okay, this is it."

Harkness quietly filed his line of thought away for later consideration, following Davies' gesture to the building that stood before them. Three stories high, though he didn't know whether it had a basement or not. The glass on the broad double-doors had a spiderweb pattern of cracks in it; many of the windows were similarly damaged, if not outright shattered.

His system took note of the coordinates. Not counting their time spent conversing, it had taken approximately twenty seven minutes to walk there from Rivet City. They hadn't met any resistance while en route.

Davies pushed the double-doors open and stepped inside. Harkness followed him in. And not even a second later the security chief got Davies by the arm and was hauling him to the side as a hail of bullets struck the door and wall directly behind where he'd been.

"Shit! What the--" he protested, but Harkness was already ducking behind a nearby counter and dragging the Vaultie with him.

"Raiders," he replied. Four of them on the balcony above that he'd been able to see. Completely strung out. He'd counted two assault rifles, a combat shotgun, and a butter knife among their armaments. The butter knife had been bloody.

One of the raiders laughed insanely from up above. "Come out an' fight, y'fuckin' pussies!"

Davies ignored the taunting. "Cool. Got a spare microfusion cell?"

"Yes." Harkness frowned deeply. "Your pistol doesn't take microfusion cells."

"Nope! Sure doesn't." The Vaultie grinned. Harkness wasn't sure he trusted that grin. "Can I have it?"

The kid obviously had an idea, and probably didn't think Harkness would approve of it because he wasn't actually spelling it out. Just for that, Harkness approved of it even less. After a few seconds' worth of deliberation, he handed the power cell over anyway and tried not to think about the giddy little laugh that bubbled out of the Vaultie as he took it.

Davies pulled out his laser pistol. His grin widened. "Cover your ears," he said. Then he popped out from behind the front counter and flung the borrowed power cell at the raiders just as they started hollering taunts about how they were going to tear him apart.

When the kid fired, the concussive force of the explosion that followed felt like it shook the whole building.

It was loud enough that Harkness could hear a ringing sound even in his own ears. He doubted covering them would have helped all that much. And the kid hadn't even been knocked off his feet; he'd just staggered a bit. Harkness watched as he threw his hands up in the air with a triumphant bark of laughter.

"Ha- _hah!_ Kiss my ass, you junkie sons of bitches!" the Vaultie crowed.

"You just wasted what would've been twenty-four shots worth of ammo," Harkness said.

"What?! I can't hear you!" Davies was still grinning. "C'mon, let's look for some books!"

He offered a hand to help Harkness up. Completely unnecessary. The security chief stared at it for approximately eight point three seconds before taking it anyway.

\---

Further into the building, Davies switched to the magnum. He didn't ask for any more microfusion cells. "Don't wanna damage the books," he said. Harkness wondered why the kid hadn't thought of that before resorting to explosions initially. It could be argued that it was a tactical decision on Davies' part, scaring the raiders so that they would be fighting in a panic instead of fighting while clear-headed.

Really though, Harkness suspected that it had a lot more to do with the kid just really liking explosions.

Once they got out of the front room, the place was mostly hallways and back-rooms. There were more raiders, of course. But between the two of them, none of the poor bastards got anywhere near landing a hit.

Except one. Crazed girl with a knife, coming at Harkness shrieking about fresh meat. He'd been reloading at the time. She was only able to manage a shallow gash in his arm before he'd bashed her skull into the nearest wall with a full-force swing of his rifle. If he'd been human, he'd probably have a lot more than just a cut. But he wasn't human.

Davies asked if he was okay. He assured the Vaultie that he was, and that was the end of the exchange. No "holy shit you're bleeding". No telling him that he should go see Preston. No further concern about it once he'd confirmed that he was still fully functional.

That was trust, wasn't it? Trust that Harkness knew his own limits and would be honest about them. It was something most people didn't do. Was it because he knew Harkness was an android? Or was it because it was Davies?

He needed more data.

"Alright, here's how we're gonna do this," Davies began, coming to a halt in front of a storeroom door. They were at the back of the building. Third floor. "We start here, work our way back up to the front. Two bags, 'kay? One for us, one for the Brotherhood."

"Any particular reason why?"

"I've got other motives for coming, Chief. It just so happens that I kinda like to read books myself." The Vaultie shrugged. "I mean, what can I say? So I'm a fucking nerd. So what?"

Harkness didn't quite understand why someone would feel the need to defend themselves for reading books. But, okay. "Are there any criteria for which books go to the Brotherhood?"

"Well, first off? We're only picking up books that are still readable. Print's still clear, and they won't fall apart if somebody sneezes in their general direction." Davies folded his arms and gave Harkness a stern look. "Second - and this is _real_ important, Chief - the books that go to the Botherhood are only the ones that I decide aren't worth actually reading. 'Cause, y'know. It's the fucking Steelers, man. They aren't actually interested in reading. They just wanna put all this pre-war shit on a pedestal so they can mourn how the world used to be."

"Right." Reasonable enough. True, it meant that everything he found had to be run by Davies for approval, but how would Harkness even know which books were worth reading and which weren't? He didn't have a frame of reference to work from.

Davies grinned. "Okay. Good. We got two days to go through this building. Top to bottom, back to front. I don't think my take-home-bag is gonna be real big, 'cause in a place like this I don't expect to find a lot of the obscure titles that I actually like. So we should end up with a pretty decent haul for the Steelers."

"How much are they paying you for the books you find?"

"A hundred caps per book." Harkness blinked, and Davies could only grin wider. "Yeah. Seriously. I'll split it with you though. Fifty-fifty."

Fifty caps per book. Harkness didn't have too much use for caps, but he'd be more than fine with that money going right into helping out or fixing up Rivet City. "Sounds fair."

They shook on it. Then Davies opened the door to the storeroom they'd be starting with, and was smacked in the chest with a flying baseball. "Alright," he said. "How much Jet does a guy hafta be on to think a pitching machine is a neat trap idea?"

Harkness had no idea, but even he cracked a smile when the machine spat out a half-dozen more baseballs after Davies smacked it.

\---

"Holy shit," the Vaultie said under his breath. "Hey Chief! Come take a look at this!"

Harkness looked up from his appointed task of _sort through these and toss the ones that are falling apart_. Earlier, Davies had found a shelf with a worn-out label of Literary Classics and promptly set Hark on putting the less worn ones into the Brotherhood sack. So-called classics were apparently not worth the kid's time; Harkness made a note of that and filed it away with his other observations. "What'd you find?" he asked.

"A fucking gold mine, that's what." With a grin the kid hopped down from the bookshelf he'd been climbing (dangerous as it looked, Harkness wasn't about to stop him) and looked over at Harkness as if sizing him up. "How tall are you?" The kid was slightly breathless. Just a bit flushed. From all the bookshelf-climbing? Maybe.

"Six feet," Harkness answered him anyway. "You okay?"

Davies snorted. "Yeah, I'm fine. I'll take a break here in a minute." He pointed to a shelf behind him, indicating a metal box that was high above his head. "Think you can get that without dropping it? If not, we can get a ladder."

Harkness considered. The shelf indicated was eighty-one inches off the ground. The box itself was seven inches tall, including the lid, and fourteen wide; the box looked like it was made of aluminum, but he couldn't tell what its contents were or what it was lined with. Even so... "If it weighs less than you do, yes," he said finally.

"I'd say it's about thirty pounds, books and all." Right. Books. "D'you mind, y'know...?" He gestured to the box again.

"Not at all." Setting down the book he'd been trying to determine the usefulness of - it was warped in places and the pages had a distinct lingering wave to them along with some smudging of the text - Harkness headed over to the shelf Davies had indicated, neatly sidestepping a few piles of books along the way. It was simple enough to pull the box down. Simpler than he'd anticipated. Davies had overestimated the weight. "Where do you want this?"

The kid pulled out a chair that had been lying on its side, dusting off the seat before sitting down and patting his lap. "Just hand it over, I'll take it."

Harkness handed the box over without comment. He noted the way the kid clapped his hands together and took the box with an almost reverent air. Davies treated different books differently. Some were thrown in the Brotherhood bag all too hastily, like they were diseased. Some were considered for a moment before they were put into a given bag with a final shrug. Some got a bit of blinking followed by a laugh before their fate was decided. Some were covertly slid into one bag or the other as if their content would be embarassing (not that Harkness was one to miss when that happened).

Apparently though, these books were special somehow. Because when the lid came off and the dust was blown away, the entirety of the box's contents earned a triumphant arm-pumping gesture and a hissed _yes_ like... Well, like he really had struck gold.

It piqued the security chief's curiosity. "So. What's in there?"

Davies glanced up from the box. Picked up a book and held it up so the cover was visible. "Clarke." He set the book down. Picked up another. "Wells." And another. "Lovecraft." Yet another. "Verne." Another still. "Bradbury."

"Your point?"

"Classic sci-fi and fantasy, man! What, do I gotta beat you over the head with it?" The Vaultie kept digging. "See, look. We got _Lord of the Rings_. We got _Narnia_. We got-- ack."

One particularly thick book was pulled out of the box like it was covered in something foul, then tossed at Harkness so quickly that he barely dodged it. He blinked down at the offending bit of literature, wondering what could be so bad about it. "Atlas Shrugged...?" he read aloud, not recognizing it.

Davies shuddered. "If any book deserves to be buried in Steeler archives and never touched again, it's that one. Fucking objectivist bullshit."

"I'll take your word for it." Carefully, he reached down and picked up the book to examine it for damage; just reading the inner cover of it had him giving it a skeptical look as well. He shut it and put it in the bag without another word. Right. Under that system of ideals, all of Rivet City would be considered leeches. It wasn't illogical, just extreme. Unforgiving.

No wonder Davies didn't like it.

Harkness was still trying to figure out why such a book would exist when the Vaultie set the box down on the floor all of a sudden, stood up, and thrust an armful of books at him. He blinked - first at Davies, then at the books - and took them obediently. "These going in the bag too?"

Davies smiled and shook his head. It was a weird little smile. Harkness didn't think he'd seen that kind of smile on the kid's face before, not quite. He filed it away to decipher its meaning later. "Nah. Read those," Davies told him.

What? "You... Want me to read these." Harkness glanced down at the titles of the books in his hands. _Dandelion Wine. Farenheit 451. The October Country. I Sing the Body Electric._ _The Illustrated Man_. All were by the same author.

"Yeah. I mean, I've gotta sleep. Eat. You don't." The Vaultie shrugged it off, like it wasn't a big deal. Like Harkness being an android was something to be taken into consideration, not something that was an inconvenience. "Gives you something to do."

And as much as he dug into his memory, he couldn't remember a time that someone who knew about what he was had treated it in quite that way. He nodded, staring down at the books. Their worn covers, their bent spines, their yellowed pages. "Why these?" The others were classics, weren't they? Things that everyone who read a lot of books would have also read?

That odd smile turned into an even more cryptic grin. "I think you'll like 'em," the kid answered.

 


	5. 4: because

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Even machines can be curious.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey guys. Look, I know I'm posting this at a weird hour for me and that I USUALLY post during the day, but I finished this at an odd hour, and then I was playing FO3 when I got it back from my proofreader, and now it's a bit late but I still kinda wanna get it posted.
> 
> So, here it is.

Night came before long, but Davies had yet to reach the point where he was too tired to be full of surprises. The kid had found mattresses, probably used by the raiders that had occupied the place before; he tried to move them away from the rooms that had the usual bodies-on-meathooks raider decorations but only succeeded in getting them to scoot along the floor a few inches.

At that point Harkness had stepped in and picked up the one that had been giving the kid trouble with little effort, hoisting it over his shoulder. The ancient springs creaked, but thankfully didn't break through the worn cloth and padding.

"Get two," Davies said.

Hadn't they discussed this? "I don't need sleep."

"There's no couches and the chairs suck ass. For reading? Sitting on the floor leaned back on a wall is the best bet, but the floor's not too comfy either." Davies smirked. "Look man, I don't know if you feel pain or discomfort, but if you do, might wanna take this shit into consideration. You'll be all stiff later otherwise."

Harkness had nothing to say to that. It'd be a lie to say he didn't get sore, and it wasn't like Davies was the one doing all the heavy lifting, so he bent and slung another of the weathered mattresses over his shoulder to take out into the main hall. Finding a clear spot to put them down was a little trickier - necessitating the removal of some debris and a half-smashed bookshelf - but it did get done.

Approximately twelve seconds after he set the mattress down, Davies came in to claim one by flopping down on it with a book, a package of stale potato chips, and a Nuka-Cola. "Thanks," the kid said absently.

"No problem," Harkness replied. A moment of silent uncertainty followed - about three seconds - before Harkness walked off to pick up his own stack of books, left on a shelf nearby. Right. Might as well read.

But, well. Shit. Which one would he read first?

The question halted him mid-step, his hand hovering two-point-seven inches from the top book in the pile. They weren't arranged in any particular order. Davies had handed them to him as they were, but Harkness doubted the Vaultie had sorted them. And Harkness didn't have enough of a frame of reference to know which one would be best suited to being read first. Were they part of a series? Some books were like that, weren't they? Meant to be read in a particular order, making the most sense that way.

He picked up the stack in its entirety and looked at the covers. There didn't seem to be a running theme to them. Aside from the author, they didn't appear similar. If anything, the titles were random and made little sense on their own. _Dandelion Wine_? How did one make wine out of dandelions? And how could a country be described by putting October in front of it? Did it mean October countryside? He couldn't even begin to decipher what it meant to "sing the body electric"; was it some innuendo he just wasn't catching?

At least the other two titles were coherent, if no less baffling. An illustrated man would just be an illustration of a man, wouldn't it? What would be so fascinating about such an illustration that it would demand an entire novel to itself? Then the last, _Farenheit 451_. Four-hundred fifty-one degrees farenheit was more than the human body could stand without being cooked. He didn't have much of an imagination, but that last title implied a damned morbid book.

Why had Davies chosen these to hand to him? Were the Vaultie's tastes just that weird? Was his estimation of Harkness that bizarre? A glance back at the kid told him nothing; Davies' attention was fixed on the book he'd picked for himself, titled _Starship Troopers_.

Well, hadn't the assumption that Harkness could decide for himself been implied when the kid had handed him the books in the first place? None of what Davies had said was an order; everything he told Harkness had an element of choice and agency to it. He could choose not to read any of it. He could choose to read something Davies had told him wouldn't be worth his time. He could even choose to leave. Go back to Rivet City and leave Davies to his fate. Or shoot Davies in the head and put the whole thing behind him, because it was troublesome.

After having frowned at the stack of books for some time, Harkness sighed and pulled out one in particular, setting the rest back down. He returned to his own mattress with _I Sing the Body Electric_ in hand.

He had choices. But he was also curious.

\---

Six short little tales in and Harkness was no closer to having any answers. The book had begun with a poem - was it a poem? - and thus it had confused Harkness from the start, because poetry made less sense to him than metaphors did. At least when paired with music it had some purpose, but as a medium he couldn't quite grasp it on its own. Wouldn't writing things in a straightforward way be better, if only for the sake of comprehension? Why were words capitalized randomly? For emphasis, maybe?

Then came the metaphors. The stream of consciousness manner in which the stories were presented. They rambled! They put emphasis on feelings of things instead of facts, and sometimes Harkness would have to spend far more time than was necessary to commit the page to memory just to understand what the words on it were trying to say.

Even then he didn't always get it. There was no guarantee. He'd go over a passage, think that he was finally starting to get used to the author's style, and then suddenly a chicken would be laying an egg that had fucking biblical passages written on it.

Why the hell would Davies even suggest this? A story about a time machine made out of a car that may or may not have run on dreams and well-wishes. A story that he assumed took place in Ireland but didn't mention such until the end, about a bunch of men dead-set on burning down an old rich man's home but couldn't bring themselves to because the old man was too nice. _A story about an inter-dimensional baby who was a blue pyramid with arms._ The more he read, the more questions he had.

Oh, he kept going. He did. He got right up to the point in the book that featured a story about an old man who programmed answering machines from all over lonely planet Mars to call himself so that he'd never be alone - because the answering machines were set to call him back at intervals with their recorded messages - and was going to keep going. He was. There had to be an answer in there somewhere, after all. Something to tie it together.

[ _"I'm coated with enzymes?" I cried above the engine roar. "No house can break down my elements, or take nourishment from my Original Sin."_

 _"Fool!" laughed the Duchess. "We shall see most of your skeleton by sunrise Sunday!"_ ]

Then he got to the house that ate people.

Mutely he closed the book, put it down, and turned his head to peer at Davies.

"Why am I reading this," he half-asked, half-stated.

The kid looked up with a questioning hum, a third of the way through his own book. "What? Oh, uh. What's the problem?"

"This book makes no sense," Harkness answered flatly. "Am I supposed to get it?"

"Wait, really?" Brow furrowed, Davies set aside his own book face-down over his leg so he might pick up the one the security chief had been reading. He opened it up and flipped through a few pages; Harkness could see over the Vaultie's shoulder that he was scanning the table of contents. "How far did you get?"

"Page one hundred three."

"Ah. Right. I think I see the problem." Davies clapped the book shut and handed it back to Harkness. "This one's a weird edition. They're never the same, one compilation to the next..." He trailed off with a shrug. "Page one-fifteen. Read that one, alright?"

Harkness nodded, taking the book back. Reluctantly flipping through to the page Davies mentioned. One more try.

[ _Grandma!_

 _I remember her birth_.

 _Wait, you say, no man remembers his own grandma's birth_.

 _But, yes,_ we _remember the day that she was born..._ ]

He gave Davies another pointed look, but the kid had already buried himself in _Starship Troopers_ again. Right. He was going to give this one last story a shot. Going to trust that it panned out.

Harkness went back to reading.

\---

So maybe, just maybe he'd been wrong. Maybe he hadn't given this author enough of a chance. Maybe none of it was making sense because Harkness was trying to look at it from the point of view of a machine, and thus his ignorance and lack of imagination were showing through.

The story that started on page one-hundred fifteen was about a machine. An improbable machine, sure. One that didn't make much sense in regards to the way it worked. But that was completely immaterial.

That machine, despite having a completely different purpose, despite not being able to self-determinate as he was, perfectly described him. Described all machines. With words that he could never have thought of himself, because he never thought about what he was or how to describe himself. He was the android A3-21. He was Harkness, chief of security for Rivet City. Those were facts.

But who was A3-21? Who was Harkness? He'd never considered those things. He knew what he was, and that was enough for him to function.

He ran his fingers over the faded text, staring at the final page of the story for far longer than he needed to for archival purposes. Harkness' system informed him of its color in hexadecimal, _cfb070_. The paper was soft under his fingertips, fragile; a book was an easily destroyed thing. It had an odd musty fragrance to it that he couldn't place, and the chemical composition of the air had no deviances worth noting that could cause it.

He'd noticed all that before, logged it in his memory. The data wasn't new. Yet he hadn't thought about any of it at the time. It had just been raw data. So like a _machine_ to log it all and not do anything with it.

The book said he was more than a machine-- that he was all the people that thought of him, planned him, built him, made him function. He was all the things they wanted to be and couldn't. That he was larger than the people who built him, because he embodied their ideas. That he had all the time he needed to collect the information he needed about an ideal to keep it clean, whole, intact.

Was this what Davies thought of him? Even though he'd been made by men like Zimmer?

Harkness could not say for certain that the book was right, but in this it at least made some sense. And as much as he didn't understand about it, the parts that he could actually wrap his head around were...

Interesting. Worth thinking about. Yeah.

"Do you... Know about more stories? Like this?" Harkness asked, looking up.

Davies was in the middle of a yawn; he blinked and turned his head to peer at the security chief. "Uh..." He seemed to consider, frowning to himself before his features softened and he shook his head slowly. "Not too many. I had some back in the Vault, but I couldn't find 'em here."

Right. The kid was tired. Not surprising, since it was _0129_. They'd both been reading for a while; both the Nuka-Cola bottle and the package of chips were empty, and Davies had balled up the empty bag to halfway stuff it into the bottle.

But, fuck. Harkness really wanted to know. If there were more stories like that one, he wanted to read them too.

"We'll look again tomorrow?" He meant to make that a statement, but there was a questioning little pitch-change at the end that made it into something else entirely. His pitch had shifted like that when he'd realized halfway through speaking that he'd need Davies to help him find those books, because he didn't know which ones they were.

The kid stifled another yawn and shrugged. "Sure. Doubt we'll find anything though." He rubbed at one eye, set his book down again in that weird face-down way. Why did he do that? Harkness had no idea. "I'm gonna sleep. Keep readin' the Bradbury though, it's not bad. _451_ 's pretty sweet. _Dandelion Wine_ is creepy as balls."

Even the Vaultie used weird metaphors. Maybe it came from the books he read. "How can something be creepy as balls?" Harkness found himself asking.

Davies chuckled softly, curling up on his side with his back to Harkness. "G'night, Chief."

Okay. Probably a good idea to let the kid sleep. "Get some rest, Davies."

Harkness would just have to spend the next few hours figuring shit out on his own.

 


	6. 5: seele

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This is illogical.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Took a bit longer this time because I struggled JUST a little bit with getting the characters to focus.

Harkness read every last story in _I Sing the Body Electric_. Even the one about the house that ate people.

He read every story in _The Illustrated Man_. It was not, in fact, about an illustration of a man, but about a man who had stories illustrated on his skin in the form of ever-shifting tattoos. Harkness decided that was far more interesting than what his first impression of the title had suggested it might be about.

By the time Davies woke again - blinking and yawning, scratching at a layer of sparse white stubble that had manifested itself on his chin and jaw - the sun had been up for several hours and Harkness had gotten most of the way through _Dandelion Wine_. Even though he'd never been to Illinois and had no idea what it was like, Harkness wondered if the rural parts of it still resembled how they were described in the book. He also wondered what a drink made of dandelions would even taste like.

Taste. He was an android and he was thinking about how things might taste.

Was this all because of the books?

"Ugh... Any unwelcome visitors?" Davies asked groggily. He was still rubbing sleep out of his eyes, and his voice was coarser and lower. Less from his nose, more from his throat. His words were just slightly muffled, like what might happen if he were to pinch his nose while talking. He snuffled. Wiped his nose with the back of his hand. Fished around in his numerous pouches and pockets, brought out what looked like a Rad-X bottle if you ignored the label having been scratched out.

Harkness took all this in - along with the hopelessly messy hair and rumpled jumpsuit - but came up empty as far as descriptors. "No," he replied. No humans at least. A radroach or two. "You alright?"

Davies grunted, squinting at the bottle and giving it a shake. He shrugged. "Had worse mornings."

"It's always like this?"

"Ehh. Y'get used to it." Davies pocketed the bottle again before heaving himself up to his feet. Even at nineteen, his joints creaked and popped when he flexed them. "Gonna get a drink. Maybe find a sink that works, get a shave."

And after that, they'd go looking for more books. Harkness picked up the one he was still in the process of reading along with the two he hadn't read yet. "I'll go with you," he said. Because he wanted to be in on the book hunting.

The Vaultie craned his neck to give Harkness a weird look as he stood. "Uh..."

Harkness paused. "Is there a problem?"

"No, no. S'just..." Davies trailed off, scratching his stubble again. "Just, uh. Stay outside the door, okay?"

Something clicked in the security chief's mind; he was quick to realize that the feeling washing over him was embarrassment. "Right. Nevermind. I'll stay here."

Davies relaxed visibly. "Thanks, Chief." He smiled, relieved but awkward.

Harkness tried to smile back.

"Don't smile, man. It's creepy."

\---

Harkness didn't know what he was staying outside for. He didn't want to know. But it was fine, because he had books. Up till yesterday, he hadn't even considered the thought of keeping himself occupied while waiting for something or someone else. He'd be on watch and he'd just... Focus on being on watch. He didn't even think about it. Except the books had made him think. Davies had made him think.

Faded ink on fragile paper, and yet it was enough to have him subtly reworking the way he looked at things. Just one day spent in the company of a young man he'd known for only sixteen days, and that day was able to completely change his perspective on both human beings and himself.

Then his perspective changed yet again when the next book he came to had been written in.

Of course, books were writing. Usually the writing of a single author, words on a page with the singular intent of whatever the person writing them had been trying to portray. Logically, he knew all of that. He didn't know why it struck him as odd that there were pencil-scribbles in the margins, inside the cover. But it did, and the difference was enough to make him pause.

He closed the book and got up, wandering through the library's halls to find Davies and ask him about it. It didn't take long. All Harkness had to do was follow the noise; apparently, Davies used an electric razor to shave.

Harkness poked his head in the open bathroom door, half-forgetting the earlier request. "Hey--" was all he got out before the razor hit the sink with a loud clatter.

"Gah! The fuck, Harkness!" The razor kept buzzing noisily away as Davies jerked a hand forward to grab his messily folded shirt from the edge of the sink so he could wipe his face with it.

His... Shirt. Right. He wasn't wearing one. The jumpsuit was unzipped down to his waist. Harkness noted a smattering of scars on the young man's pale torso; some were obviously surgical, while others looked less professionally stitched up and far less carefully inflicted. The surgical ones were also a bit more faded.

Davies glared for a moment, but after he was finished wiping his face off his expression turned quite a bit more bland. He set his messy shirt aside and reached into the sink to turn off the razor. "So did you come in here for a reason or are you just gonna stare at me like a creeper," he said.

Harkness blinked. "Sorry."

"Uh-huh." The Vaultie stowed his razor and fished around in his jumpsuit's pockets for a bit; he came up with a bottle. The label wasn't familiar, but the smell once opened made the contents obvious. Where the hell had the kid managed to get aftershave? "Still didn't answer the question, Chief."

For the second time that day, Harkness was feeling embarrassed. When had he gone and forgotten all those social rules that Rivet City had made him so familiar with? Hesitantly, he held up his book. "This book's been written in."

Davies rinsed off his hands once the aftershave was applied, closed the bottle, and wiped his hands on the shirt. So his hands were hardly clean when he reached out to take the book, but at least they were mostly dry. "Hand it over."

He seemed exasperated. Tired of giving directions. Harkness ducked his head as he handed the book over. "Sorry that I--"

"Don't apologize." Davies opened the book up once he had it, flipping through and looking at the pages. His brow furrowed for an instant before something seemed to dawn on him that made him smirk. "Huh." He handed the book back. Gave Harkness that same smirk. "Looks like this one was owned by a student."

"A student?"

"Back in the Vault, there were a bunch of books that used to be part of the curriculum for kids growing up. In the early days, teachers were in the habit of making students write notes in the margins. But then we ran outta books that didn't have two and three generations of margin-doodles, see? So they stopped." Davies picked up his shirt, slung it over his shoulder. He walked out into the corridor past Harkness like he'd stopped caring that he wasn't fully dressed. He probably had. "The books stayed in the archives. Totally defaced. Every once in a while somebody'd make noises about how the defaced books were worthless, we should throw'em in the incinerator."

Harkness flinched at the idea, his fingers curling around the book tighter. He couldn't say why he didn't like it. He just... Didn't.

Davies glanced back, caught the security chief's look, and grinned. "Hah, yeah. That's pretty much the way I feel about it too. Read _Fahrenheit_ yet?"

"No. Is it related?"

"In a tangential way." The kid headed for the nearest Nuka-Cola machine and slammed his elbow into it. Somehow, it took this as a signal to puke up a full bottle for him. "Anyway. If a book's already defaced like that? Get a pencil, write back."

"Reply to the margin doodles?" Harkness watched as Davies set the bottle down on a dented trash can so he could fish out his pill bottle.

The top of the bottle was popped off and two pills were shaken out into the kid's hand almost like the whole thing was clockwork. Then the kid closed the repurposed Rad-X bottle and pocketed it again in favor of having a hand free to get the drink open. "Hell yeah, man. Can't get any worse for a book in that state, right?" Both the pills and soda were swallowed without so much as a wince at the taste of either. "Takes on new life as a time capsule that way, too."

The whole routine smacked of years of practice. Harkness doubted that anything in those pills was recreational. "What should I write?" he asked. Because he didn't know. He didn't really have comments. Was he supposed to be polite? Was there some procedure to margin doodling?

"Whatever comes to mind, Chief." After that the kid chugged the rest of the Nuka-Cola. Then he belched. Wiped his mouth. Tossed the bottle in the trash. All of it was like clockwork still. He was more efficient about his morning routine - even with the interruptions - than almost any other human Harkness had met. Certainly more efficient than most of Rivet City's own security force.

Harkness wondered if the Vaultie would be willing to give pointers to his people back on the ship, but dismissed the idea almost as soon as it occurred to him. "Thanks." He almost apologized. Stopped himself just in time. "Have you eaten anything yet?"

"Nope. But I'll get it handled, don't worry." Davies came up and patted Harkness on the arm. His hand was cool and damp still. "Go read your books, man. I'll be out in a bit."

"After that we'll look around more?"

The Vaultie smiled at him. "Sure. There's a couple admin rooms we haven't checked yet."

Harkness couldn't help but feel that he was being indulged somehow.

\---

Even a ruined library was still a library. It wasn't hard to find a pencil. After that, the writing itself came naturally.

Whatever came to mind. He could do that. The first thing that came to mind was that the person who had owned the book before him needed to go and learn how to spell, because "archytype" wasn't technically a word and his system was giving him an error message over it. The second thought he had was wondering why the person who'd last had the book felt the need to underline a certain paragraph and note that the character speaking was "not a good person".

After fifty pages, he realized that his own thoughts could be misinterpreted as rude. He left an apology after his next remark on page fifty-two.

Davies came back when Harkness was flipping to page sixty-five. His jumpsuit was still halfway undone, but he'd put his shirt back on. Even as filthy as it probably was. Harkness wondered how many of those morning routines that shirt had survived. Probably smelled permanently of aftershave by now. "Did you eat?" he asked.

"Yup. Took a chance with a Raider fridge's contents." Davies threw a smirk in the security chief's direction, but something he saw made him stop midstep. "Wait, you're a leftie?"

"Leftie...?" The term was unfamilliar to Harkness.

"Oh, it means you write left-handed." He gestured vaguely in the direction of the book Harkness was adding commentary to.

"I can write with either hand." What, humans couldn't? "Can't you?"

Davies guffawed. "Pfhah! No. It's a mess when I try." He leaned in, close enough that Harkness could register the air pressure change of his warm breath on synthetic skin. "Hot damn, your handwriting's tiny as fuck, dude."

"Smaller font size means I can fit more in the margin," Harkness explained.

"Yeah, but you gotta have some damn good fine motor control for that. You could do art! Or, y'know. Anything that requires fine motor skills. Butchie would suggest lockpicking or hotwiring I bet."

Machines weren't artists. "Who's 'Butchie'?"

"Punk-ass greaser who isn't as tough as he thinks he is." Davies patted Harkness on the shoulder as he straightened, though he didn't use the contact to help support his own weight in any way. Weird kid. "C'mon, let's go look for more shit with robots in it."

That piqued Harkness' interest. He made a mental note of what page he was on, put his book down, and set the pencil next to it before he stood. He wasn't thinking about how he probably needed a shave as well, or who was on what shift back at Rivet City right at that moment.

He was thinking about reading more books.


	7. 6: is it real

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Error: process "cogito_ergo_sum.exe" exceeding recommended CPU usage.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter could go one of two ways. It's on the borderline, really. I almost feel like I packed TOO much in. But y'know, whatev. It's finally written. Now I can go onwards to the tasty bits. 8'D

They started the walk back to Rivet City when evening came. Two days off meant two days off, Davies had reasoned. Not two days off plus another half-day because one decided to saunter in at noon on day three still kind of plastered after two days of hard partying. It sounded like either Davies had experienced such a thing or he'd watched other people do it. Given the kid's nature, Harkness suspected the latter.

He'd gotten answers to a lot of questions he'd had. Come up with a few more questions. And in the end, he found that he didn't want to leave. Was reluctant to.

Davies encouraged him to keep the books, both the ones he'd already read and the one he had yet to read. He didn't need to keep the books he'd already read, because he was a machine and the words in them were already recorded in his memory. He wouldn't forget what he'd read. He didn't forget things. But he kept the books anyway, because... Because. He didn't know. He'd just decided he wanted to keep them.

Was it sentimentality on his part? Could an android get sentimental?

He clutched the sack of books in his hand a little tighter as he kept his eyes on the broken road ahead. The road back to Rivet City, back to duty and routine. Back to his life before books. Back to keeping up appearances. Back to sleeping, eating, cutting himself while shaving, laughing at things he didn't see the humor in--

It was his job. Protecting the people of Rivet City was his goddamn duty. How could he even consider turning his back on them? And for what, _books_? Letters arranged in a pattern to form words, ink stamped onto paper? There was nothing tangible about that. Nothing about it was real enough to justify leaving his boat behind.

Right?

He prodded at his system for an answer and got nothing in response.

A few steps from the stairs that led up to the drawbridge, Davies stopped and spun on his heel to face Harkness with a false grin curving his lips. "So. This's where we part ways."

Harkness spoke without thinking. "You're leaving?" he asked. Then he grimaced at his own tone. The hell was that? Of course Davies was leaving. He had a room at the Weatherly Hotel, but he didn't live in Rivet City.

Davies' smile got a bit more sincere though; maybe the question wasn't such a misstep. "Yeah. Gotta get these books back to the Brotherhood."

"I'll come with you--"

" _No,_ Hark," the Vaultie said firmly. At that point his smile disappeared entirely. "The Brotherhood scavs for tech, and you're tech. I'm going alone."

Harkness narrowed his eyes. "It isn't like I haven't dealt with Steelers before. They can't tell."

"Maybe not, but your big fuck-off rifle would get less of a free pass than my dinky-ass pistol does. And I don't have the kinda pull with them that would lead to them trusting anyone I brought with me, so I couldn't protect you if something _did_ go down."

( _"I'll keep you safe."_ )

Davies sighed, ran his free hand through his hair. Shifted the grip that the other had on the two bags slung over his shoulder. "Look, I'll bring you back your share of the caps by morning, alright?"

That wasn't the problem, but Davies probably knew that. "Will you be fine on your own?" Harkness asked. He had to hear it. If the kid said it, then he'd be true to his word. He always was.

"Just going to the GNR building and back..." Davies muttered. But he looked up and smiled reassuringly anyway. "Yeah. I'll be fine, Chief."

Harkness felt some of the tension melt away as soon as he heard it. "Alright. Stay safe. Don't cause trouble."

"Aaaww! Way to go and ruin my fun." The kid winked. "Later." And with that, he turned and left.

Several minutes passed of Harkness just staring after him. Watching the 101 on his back as it receded into the distance. Davies didn't look back, not once. Probably wasn't even in the kid's nature to do something like that.

He'd said he would be fine. Harkness believed him. Sighing, the security chief turned to head up the stairs that would take him to the drawbridge. Back to his city. Back home.

Lana Danvers was there to greet him. "Well, well! Look who's back." She clapped him on the shoulder as he stepped aboard, stayed by his side as he walked to the stairwell door. "Didja have fun, Chief?"

Harkness paused in the process of opening the door, craning his neck to look back at her. "Yeah," he said. Felt himself smile. Wondered if it looked creepy when he realized he was doing it. "I did."

\---

Routine dictated that he head down to the Weatherly Hotel for dinner. He was still technically within accepted parameters in terms of what counted as being on time for it, even if he was a little late by his own exacting standards.

However, routine did not anticipate him picking out the last unread book from the bag and starting to read again the moment he sat down. Nor did routine account for him continuing to read for a good half-hour before he even realized that Vera had already set his customary meal down in front of him. Sure he was aware of the change around him, but it didn't register as anything more than data to be filed away.

In fact, he didn't so much as look up from his book until he was rudely interrupted by two fingers tapping against the cover, the noise being enough to make him jerk upright to blink at the culprit; Vera was looking at him over the top of the book with a smirk curving her lips.

Harkness could only frown at her as his system drew a blank on social protocol for the current situation. "Is there a problem?"

Vera cocked her head and rapped a well-kept fingernail against his untouched plate. "Your food's getting cold, Hark."

He looked down at his plate. Right. Cold mirelurk wasn't exactly the most pleasant thing in the world; all of a sudden he regretted not having paid attention. "Sorry," he said. Wasn't apologizing what humans did when they broke from routine and inconvenienced each other in the process? Gathering his thoughts long enough for an answer was proving difficult, like his memory needed defragmenting. On reflection, it probably did.

Sighing, Vera straightened up and took the plate with her. It'd be a lie for him to say he wasn't relieved. "Must've been one helluva day, huh?" she asked. Conversational, but still needling.

She wanted gossip. "Something like that," he replied.

"Uh-huh." It sounded like she didn't believe him. Or if she did, she was drawing her own conclusions. He didn't watch as the contents of his plate were disposed of, having taken to frowning at the spot it'd formerly occupied on his small table instead. "So d'you need glasses or something? I mean, the words in that don't look that small to me."

Well, that came from out of nowhere. "Huh?"

"Your book." She set the empty plate down so she had a hand free to gesture to it. "You're leaned in pretty close."

Harkness blinked. Was he? He hadn't realized. He was only holding it as close as he'd seen Davies-- oh. "No. My vision is..." He paused when the sheer weirdness of his wording occurred to him. "I can see fine," he said finally. "It's just a habit." There, that sounded better. More normal.

Vera nodded sagely as if she'd figured out some huge secret, leaning against the desk and folding her arms in front of her. The way she pushed her arms against her chest accentuated her breasts; he assumed it was intentional, but he also doubted that she did it consciously. "Did Teddy give you that?" she asked.

How was he supposed to answer that? "It's complicated," Harkness said. At Vera's unconvinced look he added, "so in a way, yes. Kind of."

"I thought you two were scavenging those to sell them. Why keep one of them?"

Technically, he'd kept five. "It's a good book," he said instead.

"I figured." Vera offered a smile. The same kind of smile she gave Bryan Wilks. Harkness wasn't sure what to think of it. "Just try not to miss too many more meals, okay?" She took a step forward to pat him gently on the shoulder, and went back to her desk just in time for Seagrave to walk in. Of course she did the thing with her arms pushing her breasts together for his benefit, too; the difference was that Seagrave visibly took notice.

Routine, all of it. Habitual. They'd worked Harkness into their routine enough to worry when he deviated from it. He looked back down at his book, at the sentence he'd left off with. The routine of Rivet City still beckoned, but it felt hollow and pointless in comparison to urge to find out what might happen next in the story.

He returned quietly to the pages of his book.

\---

It was only after he'd finished the book, with the morning sun streaming through the security tower windows - and he had to admit that out of all the books he'd read so far, _Fahrenheit 451_ was probably his favorite when taken as a whole even if the short story about the android appealed to him on a more personal level - when it hit him that he'd forgotten to eat or sleep in the meantime. People were sure to have noticed by then that he'd sat up in his bunk reading for a good chunk of the night.

And what the people of Rivet City noticed, they talked about.

Honestly, Vera had probably already been talking about his seeming distraction from the moment he'd left the night before. She was like that. When he'd thought he was human, it'd been endearing. But as an android, it just made him nervous.

So it was nervousness that followed him to his shift that morning as he firmly resolved to stick as closely to his human routine as possible. Nervousness that he tried to hide as he sat down to eat at Staley's diner in the marketplace, in plain view so that no one could mistake his decidedly human behavior. It was the same kind of nervousness that had clung to his consciousness immediately after he'd gotten his memories back; the same feeling that had clawed at his thoughts and bogged him down with useless junk data in the form of statistics and hypothetical worst-case scenarios.

He'd been careful. He was sure he'd been careful. No one knew except Davies and Pinkerton, and he'd put forth considerable effort into keeping to his human habits.

This nervousness, this _fear_ was... Irrational. Zimmer was gone. Wouldn't be bothering him again, wouldn't be looking for him. In the eyes of the Institute, he was dead. He wasn't in any danger. And yet...

No. He wasn't going to think about it. He was safe. No one would come after him again. He wouldn't be hunted like an animal. He didn't need to run anymore. And even if anyone did come after him, the people of Rivet City would defend him as much as they'd defend any other person on the ship. The people on his boat were like a family to each other. They took care of their own.

\--but if they did find out about him, would they still consider him to be one of them?

He glanced at the people around him as he finished his breakfast. Thanked Staley for the meal almost automatically as he stood from his seat, hearing the animated conversations going on around him without really listening. He felt strangely numb while heading to his usual post, even though an absentminded check of his system revealed that everything was in perfect working order.

He was Harkness to them now. They knew him as such, treated him accordingly. But if they knew he was A3-21, would they still treat him the way they treated Harkness? Would he still be a man to them, or would he be a machine? And even if they were tolerant - even if they said he was the same person to them - would they really understand? Would his differences be allowed for? Resented? Pitied? Would there be conflict because of him?

The more he thought about it, the more unsure he was of which idea was worse. Even more troublingly, he couldn't say for certain that any of those options would lend themselves to his functioning impartially as the chief of security. Because already he was trying to compile his data on Rivet City's residents, attempting to work out which ones would be most likely to treat him fairly. All based on hypothetical scenarios that he'd come up with out of nervousness.

The marketplace door burst open, swinging inward with its usual cacaphony of creaking and groaning. It startled Harkness out of his thoughts, causing him to jerk his head in the direction of the sound.

It was Davies.

Even at a glance the kid was in rough shape; Harkness didn't have time to even consider the fraction of a second's worth of relief he felt before he was taking in the small details, things like charred patches of jumpsuit and irregular respiration and flushed features. Then he saw the unsteadiness in the Vaultie's movements as the kid came to the stairs, only one hand on the railing as the other clutched a faintly jingling and lumpy sack slung over his shoulder.

Harkness was moving before he even realized it, something in his system putting together that Davies was going to fall without him consciously being aware of it yet. One point three seconds later he was at the bottom of the stairs, just as the Vaultie lost his footing on the fourth step from the top.

The kid flailed as he fell - skinning the palm of his free hand on the railing as he scrambled to regain his footing - and then he flumped inelegantly onto Harkness with a squawk; he only just managed to catch himself on the security chief's shoulderguards before he could bloody his nose smacking face-first into combat armor. If Harkness hadn't been there, he would have probably faceplanted unforgiving metal floor instead. He could've concussed himself. Or broken his neck.

And for some reason, Harkness was irrationally annoyed at that idea. "Are you _trying_ to get hurt?"

"What--" Davies blinked up at him for all of a second before his expression screwed up with annoyance that seemed to mirror Harkness's own. Probably because Harkness had brought a hand up to check his pulse. "Seriously, chief?"

"Quiet." One-hundred thirty-six beats per minute. Way too high. Harkness frowned and eventually made himself let go of the kid's arms, feeling the nervousness come back. Not the same kind of nervousness, but he didn't have enough data to put a more fitting name on it. "You've taken everything?"

Davies rolled his eyes. " _Yes_. Christ, you're jumpy today."

"You--" Harkness stopped himself just in time to keep from ranting. Right. Davies didn't want people to know what kind of shape he was in. "--you look like shit," he finished. Because half the city would know by the end of the day if Harkness let anything slip.

The Vaultie snorted. "Nice to see you've found your sense of humor. May I sit down now?"

Harkness stepped aside, gesturing to Staley's diner; Davies was quick to head over once the way was clear, and took a seat at the bar. The heavy, jingling sack was set down on the counter in front of him.

It occurred to him belatedly that Davies had promised to come back with their jointly-earned caps. That he'd said he was going to the GNR building to turn the books in. It was a long walk to the GNR building. A long walk through super mutant territory and raider ambushes.

Davies glanced back at Harkness and grinned crookedly, tipping a freshly-opened bottle of clean water in the security chief's direction.

Shit. The kid acted like he was as made of steel as Harkness. And once again, he'd kept his word.

"So, chief..." Davies began, looking right at him over the edge of the bottle. "Wanna come help me rescue my old man?"


	8. 7: von

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> 01001001001001110110110001101100001000000110101101100101011001010111000000100000011110010110111101110101001000000111001101100001011001100110010100101110

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ahahahahaaahahah. Beta this time done by the fantastic lithophene@AO3/tumblr, who appears to be hella invested in this. My sinuses feel like balloons inside my face but I'mma post this anyway 'cause it's DONE and PROOFREAD and yesss.

"Now just hold on a minute, son." Gary Staley spoke up, leaning over his own counter and looking Davies in the eye. "You can't just go stealin' our chief of security like that."

"I'm not stealing him, I'm borrowing him," Davies corrected. "Besides, my dad's friends with Doc Li."

"Friends?" Staley let out a snort. "People don't get to be friends with that woman. She's our best scientist and that's it. She doesn't make 'friends', kid."

"Maybe you don't know her as well as you think, old man."

"Maybe a kid like you needs to remember that he's still just a guest on this boat."

" _Davies_ ," Harkness cut in. Because he knew that he could at least get through to one of them. And because this was getting out of hand. His morning routine was spiralling quickly out of control, the rhythm being thrown off. All because of this damn kid barging into his life. He felt exasperated, irritated. Yet somehow, the nervousness was completely gone. Damn. He'd have to think about that later. "I'm gonna need a little more to go on than that," he said.

That seemed to be what Davies was waiting for. "I found out where he is. A few days ago I went to the memorial--"

"Son, the memorial's crawling with muties," Staley noted.

"You think I can't deal with a few super mutants, asshole? How the hell do you think I even got to Rivet City in the first place?" Davies snapped. He sighed, ran a hand through his hair. Harkness noticed that the kid was looking better since he'd sat down. "Anyway, I went to the memorial. Down in the tunnels underneath the place they've got this water purifier. It's huge. Works on a scale that'd make your head spin. And that's what he was working on. This purifier. I found his notes. It's solid, I'm telling you."

Staley leaned forward even further, peering at Davies. "Just how large-scale are we talkin', kiddo?"

"Like I said, huge. This could give a steady supply of water to the whole DC metro area if we could get the infrastructure out there and working. Until then, the volume alone would keep people in the city proper supplied without so much as making the system sputter."

Harkness wasn't sure if Davies was exaggerating, but that kind of scale-- it couldn't be possible with the available, still-working tech in the DC area. Could it? "You never mentioned this before," he said.

The kid bit his lip, looking at the counter instead of Harkness. Like he felt guilty. "Yeah, well. It's not my thing. It's my dad's, y'know?"

No, Harkness didn't know. But Staley was the one to speak up next. "Could this purifier fix Rivet City's water problems too?"

"I don't see why not," Davies answered with a shrug. "Like I said, the main problem I see is infrastructure after we get the thing working."

Gary Staley straightened and gave Davies a stern, serious look. The kind that made Angela flinch and duck her head. Davies was unaffected, just staring right back blandly. "So if you can 'handle' muties, why d'you need our security chief so bad?"

"The last place my dad went before I lost the trail is a vault in the middle of fucking nowhere. I don't know what's in it and getting there is gonna be a chore." The kid's tone said he was losing patience. "I don't need him. I asked if he wanted to go. I'm pretty deliberate about my word choices, old man."

"How can you be scared of a vault when you come from one?"

"Hey, I'm not scared. I'm properly paranoid. Ever notice you don't hear back from that many vaults? I don't trust anyplace to not be a fucking horrorshow these days."

Staley narrowed his eyes. "Look, kid. You bring in good caps, I'm not gonna lie--"

"Ooh! Shit, right. Caps. I forgot." Davies snapped his fingers at some sudden realization, then spun his creaky barstool around to hand Harkness the sack he'd carried in before. "Here's your share."

Right. He'd given his word, hadn't he? Harkness took the sack and tried to judge how many caps might be in it by its weight; it was a cotton pillowcase, so... "Just how much is this?"

"Fifteen hundred. Came to thirty turn-ins." The kid took a swig of his water, smirking. "Don't spend it all in one place, chief."

Staley was awed. "Jesus. What the hell were you turnin' in that was worth fifty caps apiece?"

"Oh, books. And it's a hundred apiece, but I took half."

And it'd go right back into the city. Harkness would make sure of that. "Thanks," he said.

Davies went from smirking to grinning outright, tipping back the bottle of water and downing the rest of its contents. "So," he began. "You coming or what?"

Of course. Harkness had known he was probably going to follow the kid out again from the moment he'd come in the door. No idea why. It was just something that Harkness had accepted without realizing he'd accepted it. Like this kid had some kind of magnetic field that drew him in.

No. That wasn't quite right. He knew exactly why, because it was the same thing he'd thought about earlier. Those worst-case scenarios. That nervousness, that irrational fear. Somehow, Davies was excluded from all of it; Harkness wasn't afraid of him. He was different. Because he was the first human, the first _person_ to know him as A3-21 and still treat him like... Like he wasn't different at all. No, more like the differences were natural. Not bothersome. Not scary.

He was an android. A machine. And Davies made him feel more comfortable with that fact than he'd ever thought he would. "Your dad's purifier will benefit everyone, right? Rivet City too?"

Davies softened, smiling like he understood. He probably did. "Yeah."

"Then I guess I'd better make sure he gets to talk to Doctor Li about it," Harkness said.

"You're sure about this, Harkness?" Staley asked.

Harkness looked at Davies as he spoke, catching the kid's gaze. Holding it. There was so much he couldn't say. Not around others. "I'm sure," he replied. He was sure there were things Davies couldn't say too. Was that what Harkness would understand too well?

He didn't know for sure, but he was certain that there was genuine relief in the smile he got in return. "Heh. Thanks, chief."

\---

For the second time in a week, Harkness left Rivet City behind him. Down the bridge and towards the shore, trailing a few feet behind Davies and feeling more at ease than he had all morning. His laser rifle was strapped to his back, and he had an ample supply of spare microfusion cells and stimpaks on his belt. The stimpaks were a bit much, but saying that to Lana as she'd been pressing them into his hands with the insistence that they'd come in handy would be just shy of tipping her off, so he'd said nothing instead.

Secretly, he was grateful for the excuse to leave. Was Lana aware of that? Was that why she'd clapped him on the back and told him to have fun? She hadn't seemed offended when he'd informed her. Nor had Bannon, though that might've had something to do with the hefty sack of caps that had been included in that particular exchange.

He wasn't sure what to think of that yet, apart from being relieved that he didn't have to think too hard on how the ship would take his absence.

"We're gonna take a bit of a detour to avoid going past the Citadel," Davies said as they descended down the ramp and headed towards the DC ruins. "Then I thought we could swing by Megaton, if that's okay."

Harkness consulted an internal map as the Vaultie described their route. "Isn't that a little out of the way?" he asked. There was no real straight shot between Rivet City and the Wastes, but Megaton was a significant divergence if he had the coordinates right. "It'd be faster to go by way of Andale."

Davies shuddered visibly. And audibly. "Eugh. No. Rather not go near that place. And going that way would still take us past the Citadel."

"You're worried about the Brotherhood of Steel," Harkness guessed.

"Yeah. Just a bit. Outcasts aren't too great either, and down south is their turf in some spots."

Outcasts. Right. The Steelers who weren't Steelers anymore because they thought the rest of the Brotherhood had gone too soft on the matter of confiscating and hoarding tech. The black and red power armor usually gave them away easily enough, and Harkness didn't generally make a habit of letting them onto the ship when he saw them. "But why Megaton?"

"Megaton's my home, chief. Got a house there, got friends. Well, as much as a guy like me ever really has friends." Davies grinned. "Besides, I gotta get Doc Church to do a checkup, make sure my pacemaker didn't decide that all the blows to the chest are reason enough to do a bit of migrating."

Pacemakers didn't decide things like that, physics did. Pacemakers couldn't decide anything. Harkness decided not to bring that thought up. "Why not go to Preston?"

"Hell no. Preston's creepy. Pinkerton, maybe. But I'd rather just go to him for major shit." Knowing Davies, the definition of 'major shit' was a nebulous and malleable one. "Doc Church is just ornery enough that you know he's pretty cool. I like him."

Harkness had no idea why Preston would be creepy. He'd take the kid's word for it. "Do you make a habit of liking people more if they're rude to you?"

The Vaultie's grin told him that he wasn't too far off the mark. "Lemme put it this way, chief," Davies said, turning around so that he was facing Harkness as he spoke. And walking backwards while he was at it. He was going to trip over something. "What do you think of me?"

"I think you're trouble." There was more to it than that, but the complexities of it could be boiled down easily to Davies being... Well, aggravating. Exasperating. Impossible. Yet Harkness still followed him. Because-- wait, was the kid implying something there? "Just what are you trying to say?"

"Hah!" Davies swung back around so he was walking forward again, just in time to avoid disaster in the form of a bit of broken pavement. "Not a damn thing."

Right. The kid was a terrible liar. "I don't believe you." Maybe Harkness needed to work on being more polite. Was that the implication?

"Believe it or not, it's your call." Shrugging it off, Davies stretched his arms out in front of him before pulling out his laser pistol and loading an energy cell into it. "C'mon. We'll be in raider territory soon."

"Think they're stupid enough to try something?"

"I think they're wasted enough. By the way, steer clear of cars."

"Any reason why?"

"Yeah, I'm out of mines."

\---

On the way to Megaton, Harkness learned that it took two shots from his laser rifle to create an explosion the size of a mini-nuke detonation so long as there was a car handy. It took four shots from the Vaultie's laser pistol to accomplish the same thing. He learned this because at one point Davies stole his rifle to do it; apparently his pistol had become so overheated that the dust from the wasteland had turned to glass and "gummed it up".

Afterwards, Davies had kept the rifle. Harkness was handed a scoped .44 magnum instead, plus two dozen rounds for it. A few heads blown into bloody bits later, and he was starting to hope Davies didn't expect to get the magnum back.

They walked. They chatted. Davies pointed out landmarks and Harkness made note of them.

"That's the Springvale Elementary School," he'd say. "Full of assholes waiting to jump any poor bastards looking to get into Megaton."

Plenty of places were like that, according to him. Full of assholes. Or dickheads. Or fuckwads, if he was feeling creative. Sometimes the description would be accompanied by a story, with any good deeds downplayed significantly. Gore was barely described at all, and Harkness learned to judge the severity and depravity of it by how much profanity was used.

They reached Megaton's front gate just as the heat of the day was beginning to drop away, the sun hanging low in the hazy sky; _1748_ _hours_ according to his system.

Back on the ship, people would be going to dinner. Brock would be threatening to cut Tammy Hargrave off for the night and throw her out. Flak and Shrapnel would be sitting at their customary places at the diner, right next to each other. Vera would be greeting people as they came into the Weatherly lobby, listening intently for any gossip she might catch. Lana Danvers would be glancing at the clock and waiting for her shift to be over.

" _WEL-COME. TO. MEGA-TON._ " a Protectron at the entrance droned. It was wearing a cowboy hat. " _PLEASE. EN-JOY. YOUR. STAY._ "

Harkness had a feeling he was going to like Megaton. And when he got in the front gate, he could see why Davies liked it, too. It was human ingenuity. Dirty, cobbled-together, ramshackle human ingenuity. Held together with little more than bullheaded refusal to give in to the forces of nature. Everything was made of scrap or salvage. Entire buildings were held up on stilts to keep them from falling into the crater that the town was built around.

To top it off, there was a nuke sitting in a puddle smack in the middle of town.

"It's okay," Davies said. He'd caught Harkness looking. "I disarmed it."

"You disarmed a nuclear warhead?"

The kid smiled. "Nerdy shit is kinda my thing, chief." Then he tossed Harkness a keyring; the security chief caught it easily. "Here. Take those."

Harkness glanced down at the keys in his hand, sorting through them. They were all sorts of sizes and colors, different materials too. There was even a keycard with a hole punched in it so it could fit on the keyring. "What am I supposed to do with these?"

"The scratched-up one with a white stripe painted on it is the one to my house," Davies explained. He jabbed a thumb over his shoulder to point at one of the rickety sheet-metal buildings on stilts. "Just to the left. Help yourself to the fridge or whatever. I gotta talk to Doc Church, then I'm gonna go see if Moira has any spare microfusion cells in."

The Vaultie had a fridge? Just how many caps did he have? "When will you be back?"

"Shouldn't take more than an hour. If it does, follow the signs to either the clinic or Craterside Supply." He stepped up, reached out towards Harkness. Took his hand. Coaxed his fingers into curling around the cold metal and plastic of the keyring and its contents... Davies had cold hands, didn't he? They'd been that way the last time Harkness had touched them, too. "I won't skip town, alright? Don't worry."

"I'm not worried," Harkness said. He wasn't, not right at that moment. But maybe he had been worried before, earlier that day. Maybe that's what that feeling he didn't have a name for was, that not-quite-nervousness that bordered on anxiety. Worry. Concern. He was sure that was significant, but his system had no answers as to why.

But Davies had already turned away, chuckling and shaking his head. "Don't break anything while I'm out," he said.

Harkness wouldn't, but saying so would probably be pointless. Davies likely already knew as much. He just didn't say goodbye like other people did.

So, Harkness made his way towards the two-story scrap metal house that the kid had pointed out to him. Noted the clatter of his boots on the rusted steel walkway, felt the structure's imperceptible shift beneath his feet. The deadbolt clicked when he turned the key, and the door handle rattled when he turned it like it wasn't fitted correctly.

Inside, the house was larger than Harkness had originally estimated by a fair margin. And he was not alone.

"Ah, a guest!" a tinny, synthesized voice called out. "Good evening, sir! Are you a friend of Master Ted?"

Right. The kid had a Handy. Somehow, that wasn't surprising in the slightest. Especially not when it was clear that he had a vending machine, jukebox, and two half-built towers for a supercomputer hooked up to an inactive terminal just on the first floor alone. If Harkness craned his neck, he could even see a partly-assembled set of power armor in one of the rooms on the second floor, through a doorway that seemed to be missing a door entirely.

Then there were things like the heavily cushioned armchair, the shelves full of books that seemed to largely be about scientific theory from the covers, one dozen lockers that he could only guess at the contents of, the slightly bloodstained couch with a first-aid kit lying open on the seat... All right, the kid had some explaining to do about that last one.

"You could say that," Harkness answered. Was he a friend to Davies? He didn't know for sure, but to a Handy's processors he could only be a friend or a foe. "People call me Harkness," he said. "What do I call you?"

"Oh, how rude of me! I seem to have forgotten my manners." The robot floated its way down the slightly lopsided staircase, coming to a halt right at eye-level with Harkness. "My name is Wadsworth, and may I say it is ever-so-good to meet you, Master Harkness!"

Harkness fought the urge to cringe at the designation. "Anything I should know?"

"Nothing of any great importance, sir. Although I would suggest that you not attempt to use the stove at present, as Master Ted has declared it to be 'on the fritz'." The way Wadsworth said the last part made Harkness feel slightly better about how he'd had to get used to the way the kid spoke. At least he had the processing power to do it with. "Will that be all, sir?"

He had all the facts he needed, so... "Yeah. Thanks, Wadsworth." Harkness watched the robot float away, up the stairs and into the room without a door. Huh. That was probably why the door had been removed, wasn't it? To make it easier on the robot. It was so typical of Davies to do something along those lines that Harkness wasn't shocked to realize it.

But much like the worry from before, he knew it was significant. To him, at least. Harkness wasn't sure the Vaultie would even think of it as a big deal.

Whatever. Something to file away for later. Food for thought, as a human might say. Right then, he kind of wanted to get his armor off. See if he could do something about fixing it up; it felt like a few of the straps were coming loose. He didn't have the kid's ingenuity, but he could still manage a field repair without too much trouble. And considering how Davies had seemed to know how to take apart and re-use broken combat armor before, maybe the kid had a spare set or two that he used for parts. That wasn't too far-fetched, was it?

With that in mind - along with the satisfying thought that he'd figured something out for a change - he headed for the nearest set of lockers, undoing buckles on his own armor as he went.

Then he opened the first locker he came to, and was hit in the face with an avalanche of teddy bears. Multiple sizes, multiple colors. More than any sane person would stuff into a single locker. More than most would say might _fit_ in a single locker, too.

He really needed to stop thinking that he knew how this kid's brain worked, didn't he?


	9. 8: green bird

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Scan complete. 0 threats found. Recommended action: none.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Did not mean to take so long. Hark likes to spend way too much time in his own head. But hey, at least he's figured things out now. Good robot. 
> 
> Beta by Zooheaded@AO3/Tumblr. FRAND.

Teddy bears weren't the only thing that Harkness found in those lockers (and in that single locker there were thirty-two of them). One locker had lacy womens' lingerie for some reason. Another had a leather jacket with a green snake embroidered on the back. Yet another had a missile launcher and a half-dozen missiles. Another still had what looked like the remains of three sets of dismantled Talon Company combat armor - not quite what he was looking for, but it'd do for fixing up his own gear - and while he could've just left it at that and stopped looking, he was just a bit curious by then.

Just what else might Davies have in those lockers? Would it provide more insights into the mind of his strange, impossible companion? Besides, the kid had said that Harkness could do "whatever", hadn't he? So Harkness kept looking.

And because he kept looking, he found his plasma rifle.

Something in him seized when he saw it. Like his processes had just decided to falter. Like his system hitched at the sight. It wasn't logical. It was just a weapon. He had given it to Davies after his memories had been returned because it was all he'd had to give at the time. When he didn't see the kid using it afterward, he'd assumed it had been sold. Maybe junked.

That was fine with him. It was a consequence of giving people things. Davies didn't bring it up, either. Harkness was okay with that. He knew the Vaultie was practical enough that the gun would find some use with him. Even if it was an abstract use in the form of caps.

But Davies had kept it. There it was, in a locker. Coupled with a few microfusion cells. The cells looked scavenged, but the gun itself was pristine. Like it had never even been touched. So not only had the kid held onto it, but he'd also taken care of it. Kept it cleaner and in better condition than the laser pistol he was rarely seen without. Kept it as safe as he'd promised he would with Harkness himself.

Even though Harkness knew he should be angry that the gun had been left in a locker to gather dust, he wasn't. Not at all.

Why? He didn't know. His system didn't have an answer to that question. Didn't have an answer about Davies himself. It never did. Harkness realized that it probably never would. The kid was too human for his wired side to fully grasp. The teddy bears, the gun, the door for the Mr. Handy-- he didn't know how any of it made sense to anyone but Davies. Maybe it wasn't supposed to. It could be one of those things that Harkness wasn't expected to understand.

That was it, wasn't it? He wasn't expected to do anything. Not anything positive. Every time he did something positive, Davies would be surprised. Yet the kid was still opening himself up anyway. Why do it at all - why try to give Harkness what was essentially the code to his human system - if he expected to be let down? Why expose himself to the risk?

Harkness frowned at the carefully maintained gun in the locker, coming up with more questions than answers. Eventually he shut the locker - he had to fix his armor still - but by that point he'd been staring at his old rifle for long enough that he was starting to suspect he might be malfunctioning somehow. Again. Hadn't he defragmented himself once on the way to Megaton already?

It was that sentimentality again. Yet another thing that might cloud his judgment, like the nervousness from before except in an opposite direction. He felt a connection to the gun, just like he felt a connection to the books he'd left back in Rivet City. Somehow those things had worked their way into his code. Influenced him.

But the gun had belonged to A3-21, not Harkness. It had been just another weapon when he'd thought he was human. And books? Books had only been words on a page. Classes in school that his human side remembered falling asleep in the middle of. Things that people referenced a lot when they wanted to seem like they were better, _smarter_ , than some meathead soldier. So books appealed to the machine more than they had ever appealed to the man.

He liked books. The smell, the feel of the pages against his fingertips, rough but soft. Reading each word, puzzling out the layers upon layers of hidden meaning. He enjoyed it. And the plasma rifle-- even if he didn't always enjoy having to use it, he couldn't deny that it had been like an extension of himself when he'd had it.

Then there was the magnum that Davies had handed him. The one he'd been reluctant to part with. He liked it. It was satisfying to use because every shot required calculation. Compensation for recoil. Correction for the weight of the revolver itself. Illogical as it was, he had to wonder if it wasn't made just to be difficult for a human to use. For him, it required about as much processing power as breathing.

He kept on thinking about all this as he took apart his armor, attempting to use as little of Davies' supply of duct tape as possible in the process of repairing it. Not a difficult thing to do, since the kid also had wonderglue to spare in the room with the disassembled power armor. Between the activity and his own thoughts, he was able to keep himself occupied for quite a while.

But the hour that Davies said he would be gone ticked right on by.

Harkness kept track of it, knew down to a fraction of a second when it happened. He told himself it was fine. He wasn't finished with his armor yet. Davies knew these people. Trusted them. The kid would be fine on his own.

He realized - with the kind of split-second suddenness that only a machine can manage - that he was worried again. That he recognized the not-quite-nervousness from before. For six tenths of a second he froze in the act of replacing a bit of torn kevlar. Six hundred milliseconds worth of latency spike in his processes.

He-- he was sentimental over Davies, wasn't he? Everything-- all of it was tied to the kid somehow. He'd worked a small, exasperating, impossible human into his code over the course of a few weeks.

Shit.

By the time the kid burst through the door, Harkness had been trying to force himself to stop keeping track of time for over a quarter of an hour. Davies apologized for being late. Said he'd already had dinner. Laughed when he saw the pile of teddy bears on the floor that Harkness hadn't been able to stuff back into the locker. Said he'd left his laser pistol with Moira, whoever that was, and he'd get it back in the morning.

"You okay with spending the night here, chief?" he asked. The first thing he'd said that required input, and it was a question of what Harkness wanted. "The common room's kinda loud, but it's free. Moriarty's got space too. I can spot the caps if you wanna head over there."

Everything took Harkness into consideration. Both his android side and his preferences. It... wasn't helping. "I'll be fine," he replied. Not looking up. Attatchment to a thing was harmless, if anomalous. But attatchment to a person. A human. One that was right there in front of him. One that was already malfunctioning. It didn't make sense. Nothing about it was logical.

Davies chuckled. "Alright then. If it's cool with you, I'm gonna take some diphenhydramine and read for a bit until it knocks me out. Pays to be rested when you hit the Wasteland, y'know?"

No. Harkness didn't really know. He'd take the kid's word for it. "Get some sleep, Davies."

"You can call me Ted if you want, chief."

Right. Calling each other by name was a thing friends did. And that's what they were-- friends. Mutually sentimental.

He really needed to stop overloading his processors before his internal temperature had the chance to creep any higher.

\---

Nothing particularly noteworthy happened for the next fourteen hours. One day gave way to the next without incident. Harkness availed himself of the books on the Vaultie's shelf while the kid slept, but none of them were particularly interesting. Technical manuals, medical texts, and a book on famous speeches throughout history were all scattered in amongst the books on science and coding and mathematics.

It was useful information, but he wouldn't have read any of it if he weren't bored. Eventually he gave up on them and settled into the armchair to do maintenance and diagnostic routines instead. Anything to keep his processes occupied with something that wasn't his earlier revelation.

Davies - no, _Ted_ \- was up before dawn. Sunlight was just starting to filter through the gaps in the house's sheet metal as the kid was going through his morning routine.

"Mmh, hey. S'up?" he'd mumbled as he came down the stairs, still rubbing sleep from his eyes.

"Defrag," Harkness said simply.

It was all he needed to say. Ted shrugged. Didn't even stare. Didn't question the excuse. "A'ight, cool." And that was all that passed between them for an hour.

Right. Maybe that was noteworthy. Harkness didn't know anymore. He didn't think he could look at it objectively even if he were to try. Sentiment made things seem more important regardless of whether or not they actually were.

Cool fingertips brushed his arm. He sucked in an involuntary breath and looked up to see Ted leaning over him. "Hey," the kid said. "You gonna be ready to go after I've gotten breakfast?"

Harkness blinked. "I-- yeah. Should be."

"Good." Ted smiled. It was a soft look. Gentle. Harkness couldn't remember him looking at anyone else like that. "Take your time. As much as you need."

The maintenance routines had been done for a while. Harkness was just stalling. "Thanks," he said anyway. Ted gave him a final pat on the arm before heading out the door.

Definitely not noteworthy.

It wasn't until Ted came back and they were getting ready to leave that things actually picked up. The first thing the kid went to grab in the process of gearing up was the missile launcher, plus three missiles; he handed it all over to Harkness in a duffle that was more patchwork repairs than bag.

Harkness was dubious. "Are we really going to need this?"

"Maybe. Who the fuck knows at this point." Ted shrugged. The microfusion cells were pulled out of the locker that housed the plasma rifle, but the rifle itself remained. "Never been in a vault that wasn't mine. Don't have a goddamn clue what we'll find."

"I thought vaults were supposed to be safe."

"Hah!" Shaking his head, Ted sifted through the lockers until he came to the leather jacket. "What gave you that idea?" He seemed to consider for a moment before shrugging off whatever thought he'd had and throwing it on over his jumpsuit.

It looked a few sizes too big for his wiry frame, and the contrast between the black leather and Ted's coloration somehow made the kid's hair look whiter, even though Harkness knew it was the same shade it had always been. "Then what makes you think your father's still alive?"

"Well, that tough bastard must've made it to the Jefferson Memorial and the GNR Plaza _somehow_ , right?" Small energy cells and microfusion cells were loaded into the jacket's pockets, along with several frag grenades and what looked like a couple of tin cans rigged with... Egg timers? "Besides, where d'you think I got my stubbornness from?"

"Chemical imbalance?" Harkness suggested. "Head trauma?"

The kid snorted. A moment later he paused in his pocket-stuffing to do a double take. "Did you just snark at me?"

Maybe. "Is it a problem if I did?"

Ted grinned, all teeth and wicked amusement. "Not a bit."

There. That was probably worth making a note of.

\---

They set off at _0846_ , heading almost due west out of Megaton. The sheriff (" _That's Luke Simms," Ted had said. "He's cool."_ ) had wished them luck on the way out, and the protectron outside the gate had thanked them for visiting. The sun was at their backs, the local wildlife didn't seem to want to go anywhere near them, and Harkness was content to let Ted go on about whatever landmarks they were passing or avoiding as they trudged across the vast wasteland.

It was nice. Relaxing. Harkness realized that he should probably find it alarming just how calm he was, but his system wasn't raising any alerts. And try as he might, he wasn't coming up with any worst case scenarios, either. Not like he had been back in Rivet City.

The nervousness was gone. He felt safe. Which was... Illogical. There were no walls. There was no drawbridge. The only thing standing between him and any dangers he might face out in the middle of nowhere was a small, defective human. Worse still, a human he was sentimental about. If it were anyone else, he would have every reason to tie his processes up in anxious knots while he thought of all the ways things could go wrong.

But all of the data he'd gathered pointed to this human being absolutely trustworthy. So nothing short of questioning his own data storage - or his own ability to protect the kid's safety, given his newfound attatchment - could really frighten him.

That settled it, then. Harkness was safe enough--

"Shhhhshsh." Ted skidded to a halt not far from a short ( _seven feet, two inches_ ) ridge, gesturing for Harkness to do the same with an outstretched hand. His posture went almost completely stiff and upright.

What was-- ah. There was a rustling sound somewhere beyond the ridge. A wet huff of breath. Something hard scraping over rock and gravel and dirt. Harkness frowned to himself. Yao guai, maybe?

He glanced questioningly at Ted; the Vaultie caught the look and quickly shook his head. He had a rare, grim sort of expression as he carefully pulled a grenade out of his jacket. Harkness blinked as the kid wordlessly suggested that they use the grenade as a distraction and run _away_ from whatever it was.

Just what the hell had Ted caught sight of?

Harkness started to reach for his laser rifle just as whatever was above them went dead silent. Ted froze completely, immobile except for his breathing. Then there was another huff above them. More scraping. Rocks and pebbles shifting under the steps of some massive animal. It was coming closer. Ted's lips twisted in a sneer; he mouthed the word _fuck_ silently.

Without warning, he spun on his heel and flung the grenade over the ridge. He was on the move by the time it was in the air, bolting in the opposite direction. Most humans would be more than a quarter of a second behind. Harkness was probably lucky he wasn't human, because the only thing that made him that far behind to begin with was the act of getting out his rifle.

The grenade went off in a shower of rocks and dirt behind them. The animal-- the _deathclaw_ had definitely noticed them by then. Ted was already pulling another out of his jacket as he ran.

"To hell with shooting, Hark, just _run!_ " he shouted.

No. "Running won't stop it," Harkness called back. The deathclaw was gaining ground too quickly. Harkness could hear it behind them. Its heavy, rhythmic gait told him that the grenade hadn't done shit. They had to at least cripple it.

It was a damn good thing that at least one of them couldn't be ripped to shreds that easily, huh?

Harkness stopped. Turned. Took aim at the charging animal. It was closer than he'd thought. He fired. Two shots to the right leg, just as it was bearing down on him. The deathclaw hissed and snarled. Its steps fumbled. He took aim at the other leg.

Then the rifle jammed.

A human's desperate, fleeting instinct would be to smack the side of the gun. Sometimes that worked with assault rifles or SMGs. But laser rifles didn't work like that, and Harkness wasn't that dumb. The precious moments that a human might've spent dicking around with their gun were moments he used to fling the damn thing aside and put some distance between himself and the deathclaw. If he hadn't done that, it probably would have torn straight through his armor and ripped right through to his metal ribs instead of gouging his right arm.

He grit his teeth against the pain of it as his system assaulted him with alert messages about the damage. Alerts that almost drowned out the sound of Ted's voice cutting the air with a panic-stricken shout of his name. Right. Nothing he couldn't handle. And the animal's attack gave him an opening.

He grabbed that hand-- paw-- _whatever_ before the deathclaw could pull back. Gripped and wrenched it with both hands. There was an audible _crack_ as the bones snapped like twigs. The deathclaw writhed and pawed at the ground as he let go of its mangled limb. Tried to take another swing at him with its uninjured paw. He sidestepped it easily.

There. Crippled. Harkness let out a slow breath as he stepped back. Then he tensed when not one, not two, but _five_ shots in rapid succession hit the deathclaw right in the head, bringing it from "crippled" to "dead".

Of course. Ted still had his laser pistol. "Couldn't you have done that a little sooner?" Harkness found himself asking, not bothering to keep the exasperation out of his voice. Pain was taking up a bit too much of his processing capacity for him to put forth that kind of effort.

"Actually, no. Even VATS couldn't keep up with that shit." The Vaultie was at Harkness's side before he'd even finished speaking, holstering his pistol along the way. "Lemme see your arm."

Was Harkness supposed to know what VATS was? And how would an untrained human know how to patch up an android? Harkness narrowed his eyes, but reluctantly held out his arm all the same. "Do you even know what you're doing?" he asked. Three deep gashes on a human would be muscle and tendon and nerve damage. Maybe some severed veins. For him it was severed wires and faulty sensor data and--

Ted sighed irritably as he took Harkness's arm, bowing his head to look at it more closely. His brows were tightly knit, and he was chewing his lip as he inspected the injury. Harkness was struck with the thought that the kid was actually worried.

Then he thought back to bloodstained cushions and a first aid kit, and realized that this kid had probably stitched _himself_ up before.

"I think I can fix this," Ted said hesitantly. "Pretty sure... Yeah."

Well, Harkness had trusted the kid with everything else up to that point, hadn't he?

 


	10. 9: fugl

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The tin man finds a heart.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Beta by Zoo again, since Lithophene is playing text games and Potionsmaster is doing...stuff? Idk. Whatev. Have a chapter.

"Shit, Butchie's gonna kill me," the kid muttered as he yanked off the leather jacket. Then he started trying to tug off one of the sleeves while Harkness watched from the seat he'd been shoved into. It was a broken down desk chair on casters - it had creaked under his weight when he'd sat down, and he had to brace his legs to keep it from rolling - but at least he could prop his arm up on the armrest. Meanwhile Ted had found out a metal folding chair for himself and sat across from Harkness without preamble.

Either that jacket was really well put together, or Ted had the upper body strength of... Of something that didn't have much upper body strength. Metaphors. Right. Harkness still needed to work on those. "Do you need help with that?" he asked.

Ted stopped pulling at the jacket long enough to shoot Harkness a steely glare. "No. You don't get to help until you've stopped bleeding."

Harkness shrugged. He didn't feel like fighting that with blood still flowing somewhat freely from the three long, deep gashes in his arm. The pain had receded to a dull, stinging throb in the time it had taken for Ted to drag him to the shelter of an abandoned power station - giving Harkness the cryptic excuse of not wanting to waste water - but he'd also lost some feeling in his fingers. He could still move them, but without sensor data he couldn't control his grip as well. On top of that, having to reroute the signals from the damaged circuits had created a slight lag in that hand's movements. He could compensate, but it still felt clumsy.

Functional, but far from optimal. He didn't dare take hold of anything that might break accidentally. Still, he'd take being damaged over his human being torn apart by a deathclaw.

His human. Shit. When had he started thinking like that? Another irrational thing to add to the steadily growing list.

With an irritable growl, Ted gave up on the jacket and flung it aside in favor of unzipping his jumpsuit to the waist. It took some fumbling and muttered curses for him to pull the upper part of it off with his pip-boy still on, but he managed it; not long after that, he went to yank his shirt off over his head with about the same level of difficulty. Harkness was confused as to why until he saw that the Vaultie was tearing the worn cotton into strips.

"Gave up on the jacket?" Harkness said. He probably still would have helped if the kid had asked him to.

Ted smirked. Chuckled somewhat breathlessly. Harkness frowned; had Ted exerted himself that much? It hadn't seemed like it. "Yeah. Probably for the best anyways." He took Harkness's arm again and wrapped one of the strips tightly around it, just above the elbow. Hurt a bit. Made the injuries ache. "Sorry," the kid said, not looking up. "Tourniquet. Since the stimpaks didn't do shit."

They'd done a bit. Not much, though. Most of the chems in a stimpak's drug cocktail weren't compatible with synthetic blood. His system had registered it as contamination and scrubbed most of it. But Ted had insisted. "It's fine," Harkness said. Because something in the kid's expression made his processes hitch again. Made him want to-- to fix it. So that brow wouldn't be so furrowed. So those eyes wouldn't look quite so wet and vulnerable.

"Heh." Ted pulled out his bottle of purified water, unscrewing the cap with bloody fingers. He took a sip. Seemed to consider. Then he shrugged. Tipped the bottle to pour the cool water over the wounds. Harkness jerked involuntarily, sucked in a breath at the shock of it. "Shhhh," the kid urged. "I know, I know." Even his voice had softened.

"You're wasting water," Harkness reminded him, teeth clenched.

"There's more here." More water was poured onto a strip of torn cotton, which Ted dabbed against the wound. "Shit, need to add a soldering iron and electrical tape to the list of things I gotta carry with me."

What? "Why would you..."

"Can't exactly splice your wires back together," the kid said. "Well, I could, but you'd be fucking miserable if I treated your wiring like you're a busted toaster."

Right. Harkness wasn't a toaster. He wasn't even a Handy. But-- "You said you could fix this." He didn't mean to sound accusatory, but that's how it came out.

Ted didn't seem offended. "I can fix the wounds themselves. Even without stitching, I can cauterize it. But I'd need proper supplies for the... Y'know. Mechanical bits."

"You'd burn it closed?" That. Didn't sound pleasant. Would it even work? How would the kid manage it?

"Yeah, turn down the power on my pistol and-- oh, don't look at me like that."

Harkness didn't know what _like that_ was, but he felt he was within his rights to give Ted a funny look at that point. He'd seen how that laser pistol was generally used. "This doesn't seem like a good idea."

"I've done it before. Christ." Coming from the kid whose scars were all prominently on display, that wasn't all that encouraging. Harkness was about to say as much, but Ted pressed a bloody finger to his lips before he could speak. "And I wouldn't have to come up with crazy shit like this if _somebody_ hadn't jumped in front of a fucking deathclaw instead of running in the opposite direction like a sane person."

"You threw a grenade at it."

"To slow it down!"

"What I did slowed it down. You just pissed it off."

"What you did could've gotten your dumb ass _dismembered!_ "

"And if we'd tried to run, you would've been the first thing it caught." Harkness was... Angry. Really, honestly angry. His chest felt too tight. He-- he wanted to grab Ted by the shoulders, and--

He... didn't know. His hands clenched uselessly into fists. Shit. What was wrong with him? It wasn't like it was hard to see that Ted was just as worked up as he was; the kid was glaring at Harkness like he wanted to start throwing punches around.

But there was something else there, too. Something that Harkness couldn't quite define, intermingled with the anger and worry. That undefined something wasn't helping matters. In itself, it didn't piss him off further, but it caught in his system and made his processes stuttery and fragmented all over again.

Eventually, Ted was the first to break eye contact. First to flinch. "Shit," he muttered. "This is why I usually worked alone."

Harkness narrowed his eyes. "Because people disagree with you?"

"No," the kid said. Not looking up. He went back to cleaning up Harkness's arm instead. "I'm... not good with people getting hurt. Y'know, because of me."

Right. Apparently, neither was Harkness. Should he apologize? Would that help at all? The anger had started to simmer down to the usual levels of exasperation and annoyance. This kid was impossible.

Turned out that he didn't have to say anything. Ted broke the silence first. "Sorry," he said. "I, uh... I've never really thanked you. For-- well, for anything."

What? Yes he had. "So far you've thanked me three times."

Ted snorted. "See, here I was about to say something all gushy, and then you just _had_ to go and ruin it, huh?" Harkness blinked. Where had that come from? "Anyway," the kid continued, "I just... I wanted to say I really appreciate this, alright? I know how much of a pain in the ass I can be."

No. That wasn't right at all. Aside from the deathclaw, Ted had been nothing but accomodating. And even that may have been handled better were it not for Harkness having an attatchment. He couldn't say for certain that his judgment hadn't been clouded. Only that he had been absolutely certain of what he was doing at the time. He'd been standing between his human and the murderous giant lizard because he'd been sure it was the right thing to do.

He didn't need thanks.

Before he could say as much, though, Ted was pulling out his laser pistol. Wiping his hand off on his jumpsuit so he could better get at the screws on the casing.

"Let's get you fixed up, alright?" he said as he was popping the casing open. And Harkness was reminded of why he'd had concerns about this plan to begin with.

\---

There would be a scar.

Usually, Harkness healed with little difficulty. He was made to; it would be inefficient for him to have to run back to the Institute every time he was injured in search of a runner, so his synthetic flesh was made to self-repair. Still, the process was slow enough to be a hindrance while he was in the process of healing, and it took more energy than usual. Nor did it do anything for mechanical damage, although that was infrequent enough that it was rarely an issue.

But this was different. New. Completely unlike any field repairs performed on him before. He could feel a twinge when he moved his arm. The damaged flesh didn't give him any sensor data but the skin around it tugged and itched uncomfortably. It hurt. Ached. But it wasn't the same as the deep throb of blood loss and open wounds. His power consumption wasn't as affected.

He could work with that.

Ted hadn't been wrong when he'd guessed there was water in the power station's small fridge. It wasn't entirely clean, but it was cold. There was Nuka Cola too, and even one bottle that glowed. He was ecstatic when he found the glowing one; as he ate a scrounged lunch of stale chips and snack cakes, he was half-distracted by the task of mixing up the glowing concoction with a few other things he found scattered around the power station in one of his empty water bottles, using a spork as a stirring stick.

The kid didn't seem satisfied with the mixture until the spork melted. As the cap was screwed back on, Harkness wondered what the hell the bottle was even for.

"Can never have too many grenades, chief," Ted informed him. He'd caught Harkness staring.

"Sorry."

"Ehh, don't be. You stare but you don't leer. It's uncanny, not gross and skeezy." Then Ted went on a tangent about a Japanese roboticist and something called the uncanny valley. Large portions of his tangent were mumbled through mouthfuls of cream-filled prepackaged confection. Once lunch was finished, apparently the tangent was, too; they left the old power station soon after, Ted pocketing the "nuka grenade" and giving Harkness back the magnum.

When they started heading west once more, the sun was just starting to get at an angle that promised to be annoying later. The laser rifle was left in the dirt, forgotten. Harkness didn't miss it a bit.

As they kept walking on their new path, he noticed that Ted had taken to glancing often at his pip-boy. Harkness also noticed that the kid's mood was souring the more he checked it.

Not the same kind of soured mood that the earlier argument had produced, though. More like the kind of annoyance that broken bobby pins and sore fingers produced after he'd been trying to open a locked door, something that Harkness had witnessed when they'd gone to the library. This time, it seemed to be directed at something the pip-boy was indicating.

Even androids got curious. That curiosity won out against his better judgment after about three miles of increasingly annoyed scowling. "Is there a problem?" Harkness asked.

Ted's lips twisted in displeasure. "Yeah. I was hoping to avoid Evergreen Mills."

Harkness went over a map of the area in his mind. Admittedly, that map was a bit dated. "Care to explain why?"

"Word on the street is that it's raider territory." Another scowl at the pip-boy. "And it's a big fuck-off gorge according to my map."

"So we go around it. Shoot the ones that come looking for trouble."

"Yeah, but that doesn't make it less of a mess. Or less of a delay." Ted shook his head, sighing irritably. "Goddamn. Why'd there have to be a fucking deathclaw this far south? Usually they hang around on the other side of the river."

"Explains why the local wildlife made itself so scarce."

"Does, doesn't it? Still threw us off. S'like fate's going 'say whaaaat, you finally decided to get off your ass and go on that rescue mission? Well too bad, kid, fuck you.' I swear, if there is a higher power then they can eat an entire bag of dicks."

Harkness blinked at the sudden tangential rant. It sounded significant, but he was distracted with trying to picture someone eating a sack of disembodied genitalia. "That's... A colorful description."

"Well, hey. If you like it, I got a million more where that came from."

He couldn't say that he liked it - more that he didn't get it at all - but at least Ted wasn't still upset. That was enough.

\---

Evergreen Mills was indeed in a gorge. It seemed to be some kind of factory. For what, Harkness couldn't tell. Steel? Concrete? Whatever it had produced at one time, it didn't produce it any more. Now it was full of corrugated scrap metal shacks, electrified fences, knocked over railway cars, and raiders.

Oh, and there was a super mutant behemoth in there, too. Smack in the middle. The only thing keeping it in check was a thirty foot tall electrified fence, powered by a generator and topped with barbed wire. It looked exhausted. Probably from all the time it must have spent raging against the dented fences.

Harkness had no sympathy for most super mutants; they rarely gave him reason to feel sorry for them. Yet he felt bad for this one. He wasn't sure why. Super mutants weren't very smart. The bigger they were, the dumber they seemed to be. Still, though. He doubted seeing an animal being kept in an electrified cage by raiders would be a pleasant sight either. Maybe it was like that.

"Shit," Ted breathed, his elbow a few inches from Harkness's own. They were crouched on top of a ridge on the eastern side of the gorge, largely out of sight. Or maybe raiders were just that easy to escape the notice of? Who knew, really. "Poor bastard."

Right. He must have been looking at the super mutant, too. The damn thing was downright miserable. "I don't know that there's anything we can do," Harkness said. Because it didn't look like there was. The gorge was crawling with raiders, and the behemoth was smack in the middle. Even if they did do something, there was no guarantee that the super mutant wouldn't just attack them afterward. None at all.

Even androids had limits to what sort of beating they could take.

But Ted was looking at him by then. No, not at him. At the bag Harkness still carried. The one with the missile launcher, along with three missiles. Harkness frowned deeply. "Ted. What are you thinking?"

"Wondering how good your aim is," the kid responded. Then he grinned broadly. "Hey. Whaddya say we--"

"No."

"Whaaaaat! C'mon, man. You won't even listen?"

"We're not bombarding the raiders with missiles," Harkness said firmly. "We don't have enough."

Ted pouted. Lower lip jutted out, brows furrowed, head tipped down so his eyes seemed larger. Harkness was unaffected. "But that wasn't even what I was gonna say!"

"Sure it wasn't." Harkness started to get up, but Ted grabbed him by the arm and he stilled. "What?"

"C'mon. It really wasn't what I was gonna say."

"Then what _were_ you going to say?"

"I was gonna suggest we bust the poor mutie out from here."

Harkness paused to stare blankly at the kid as he processed that statement. "How would we even do that with three missiles?" he asked after just under half a minute of consideration.

"We'd only need one. Still have a couple left over for the Vault that way." The grin returned to the Vaultie's face, along with an anarchic gleam in his eye. "All we gotta do is hit the generator."

That... Was not a bad plan. But they only had three missiles. Harkness was wary of depleting their supply that quickly. He frowned as he went over their mutual inventories in his head. Scoped .44 magnum. Laser pistol. Lots of grenades. Water. Ammo. Energy cells. Microfusion cells. Scavenged cigarettes that neither of them smoked. Bits of scrap metal. Remains of a torn-up shirt. Three missiles. Missile launcher.

"So whaddya say?" Ted asked.

"I'd say my throwing arm is better than yours," Harkness answered. When he met the kid's gaze, he was already calculating distance, wind speeds, trajectories. "Think you can spare one of those grenades you like so much?"

It didn't even take a second for Ted to understand, pulling out a grenade and offering it up without hesitating. Harkness took it, worked its weight into his calculations. "Careful, Hark," the kid said. "That almost sounded like flirting."

And Harkness nearly fumbled his first throw.

 


	11. 10: is

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Things stopped making sense a while ago.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Heyaaaaaaaa folks. This one took a while again, mainly because I had my mind set on certain things happening and they just didn't fucking WORK so I ended up just letting the characters do as they pleased and WELP we see how that's gone.
> 
> Beta by Zooheaded@tumblr/AO3. My lovely, lovely frand who is so fantastic and wonderful for doing this.

It was damn near comical - even to Harkness - to watch as the behemoth stared at its no-longer-electrified cage door for several seconds, rising slowly to stand and plod over to the door to stare at it a bit more. If it weren't for the distraction, Harkness wondered if the raiders below might have heard Ted's stifled giggling and come after them.

With one lumpy, fat finger, the behemoth cautiously poked the cage door, causing the metal to groan and bend from the abnormal pressure that the super mutant could exert on it even while being gentle. All of the raiders Harkness could see had stopped whatever they were doing and were transfixed by the sight of the now-freed mutant. Ted was still trying not to burst into laughter beside him.

The super mutant paused again, seeming to consider things with its shrunken pea-brain. Then it grabbed the cage door in one meaty fist and proceeded to wrench it off its hinges.

Even Harkness allowed himself a faint smirk at the chaos that followed.

Once the raiders were fully preoccupied, the two of them were free to go around the gorge unmolested. It took a bit of tugging at Ted's sleeve to get him to move; kid wanted to watch. Understandable. Harkness could confess to some morbid curiosity himself. However, sticking around long enough for either the super mutant or the raiders to win out and come for them afterward wasn't something that appealed to him. On the off-chance that it was the mutant who emerged victorious, Harkness wanted to be as far away as possible.

After that, the last leg of the trip was fairly straightforward. Nothing but dirt and the occasional mole rat between them and their destination, which was fine by Harkness. Ted's mood was greatly improved after Evergreen Mills, and he was whistling "Rhapsody in Blue" to himself as he walked.

Harkness decided he greatly preferred his human being happy enough to whistle over said human being upset enough to get agitated. He wasn't about to forget what had happened earlier that day anytime soon. Even if Ted was able to put such things to the back of his mind easily, Harkness wasn't. A handful of his runtimes were still dedicated to it a few hours later.

He had little doubt in his mind by then that the sentimentality was indeed mutual. It fit the data he'd gathered thus far. He didn't know what the extent of it was on Ted's part - he didn't even know what he might have done to earn such a thing - but he was almost certain it was there. Had to be. The Vaultie's reactions fit all the right parameters for it, albeit within an acceptable margin of error that could just be a result of Harkness drawing the wrong conclusions between human memory and android observation.

But even though he had that data and had drawn his own conclusions from it, he had no idea what to do with it. Sentimentality took a lot of forms. He didn't know if Ted was aware of it, let alone whether or not he was one of those odd humans who reacted in violent opposition of it once they were made aware. Statistically speaking, the latter was entirely possible - even probable - knowing Ted.

And then there was the comment about flirting. Completely anomalous, given all the other data that had been gathered leading up to that point. Was Harkness expected to flirt? Was he being warned against it? What even counted as flirting? The definition of it to humans was nebulous at best, and seemed to rarely follow what actual definition of the word was. It was entirely possible he'd been acting in a way that could be misconstrued as flirtatious just because he didn't know how it worked.

Harkness was at a loss, and his system was completely unhelpful. It said the best odds he had for maintaining this-- this _thing_ between them rested with simply keeping his damn mouth shut, and he didn't like that idea much at all. Ted had taught him to resent stagnation and inaction.

He-- he _wanted_. Wanted so many things. Intangible, illogical things that he didn't really need. Things that had nothing to do with his functioning. All of them relating somehow to this human. His human. A human who could whistle his way through the wastes.

Harkness wondered if androids were able to whistle.

The tune halted at what Harkness approximated to be the twelve minute mark; Ted slowed, then came to a halt as he peered into the distance. Harkness almost ran into him.

"Shit," the kid muttered. He was glancing between their surroundings - a whole lot of nothing with a run-down car repair place just ahead - and his pip-boy, all while frowning. Not the same kind of frown he'd had when Evergreen Mills had loomed up ahead, either.

In fact, it looked to Harkness like Ted was just a little bit lost. "There a problem?"

"Eh." Ted shrugged off the question and gave his pip-boy a good _thwack_ ; something he seemed to immediately regret, if the stifled yelp and subsequent accusatory pout directed at the device were any indication. "Says here we're at the right coordinates."

Harkness's brows lifted. "So what's stopping you?"

Ted gave an annoyed sigh, then gestured to the surrounding countryside. "Do you see any displaced dirt? Any mound of rocks and junk that might indicate someone dug a big fuck-off hole in the ground?" The blank stare Harkness fixed him with only seemed to aggravate him further. "Dude, think about it. You dig a hole, there's gonna be displaced dirt. Even expanding an existing cave system, there's--"

"Ted," Harkness began, not quite believing that he was having to say anything, "there's a building right there."

"You think I can't see that, asshole? I'm not _that_ blind--"

"Ted." A bit firmer that time. "Buildings have basements."

The kid blinked for a while, whatever protests he might've had dying in the wake of such an obvious revelation. "And basements can connect to underground tunnel systems," he mumbled.

"Right." Harkness paused as something occurred to him. "Was the vault you lived in indicated by a mound of dirt?"

Ted huffed, turning on his heel to start walking towards the building. "You shut the hell up."

\---

Harkness was starting to think that his human might be distracted.

First, it had been Harkness that had thought to actually look in the obvious place the coordinates indicated instead of having prior expectations color his judgment. Then it had been Harkness who actually found the passage to the vault, because Ted kept looking for a door with stairs or some kind of hatch going down to a cellar when he should have been looking for... Well, a button on the wall, as it turned out.

"I could've done that," Ted grumbled as the false patch of floor had receded.

Right. He could have. "Why didn't you?" Harkness asked.

"Shut up, you," Ted told him again, before descending into the basement. And Harkness did shut up, but only because there was nothing else to say if Ted wasn't going to answer the question.

They descended several flights of stairs, made their way through a few corridors, and eventually came to a massive door that resembled a giant cog with _112_ emblazoned on it in a neat and tidy font. The same font as the jumpsuit Ted wore.

Grimly, Harkness pulled out the magnum. Ted wasn't far behind with his laser pistol. The kid reached for the console to open the door with one hand, glancing back at Harkness warily. Harkness nodded. The appropriate buttons were pushed. The huge Vault door opened to a fanfare of warning klaxons and flashing lights. And both of them went inside.

The first thing Harkness noticed about the Vault was that it was very clean. The second thing he noticed was the robobrain that was slowly trundling towards them on its tanklike treads. He almost shot it. Almost. A hand on his arm stopped him.

"Hold up," Ted told him. "Let's see what it wants."

"Welcome to Vault 112, residents," the robobrain said in the usual mechanical voice, all programmed inflections and false kindness. Harkness didn't quite trust robobrains. Too complex, with too much artificial pleasantness programmmed into them. "According to sensors, you have arrived 202.3 years behind schedule."

"Cool." Apparently, Ted was just as unnerved by the cheery robot as Harkness was. "Could you let us in?"

The robobrain continued as if Ted hadn't spoken. "Please re-dress in your Vault-Tec issued Vault suit before proceeding. If you have misplaced your suit, I am authorized to provide you with a new one."

Ted rolled his eyes and irritably tugged off his jacket, tying it around his waist while muttering about how he'd been sweaty anyways. Afterwards he held his arms out to show off the Vault suit underneath for the robot's benefit. "There. Happy?" Then, realizing that the robot probably couldn't respond to something like that, "--is this a satisfactory example of a Vault-Tec issued Vault suit?"

The robot said nothing, turning instead to Harkness and repeating what it had said about re-dressing. Harkness blinked at it. "I... I don't have a--?"

"So get it to give you one?" Ted tugged at his own Vault suit like he was trying to get it to air out.

Right. Harkness looked down at the robobrain. It'd probably make things easier if he were to wear it, wouldn't it? By his reckoning, it was likely that the Vault's automated security was programmed to recognize the suits somehow. "I'll need a new suit," he said to it.

The robot opened a compartment in its chassis and pulled out a neatly folded suit to hand to Harkness without comment.

Was that how easy it was to get into a Vault? Just greet the robot at the door, put on the suit, and walk right in? He set the suit down on a nearby console and began peeling off the various layers of his combat armor.

"Once dressed, please proceed down the stairs to the main floor so that you may enter your assigned Tranquility Lounger," the robobrain continued. After that it must have run out of pre-programmed things to say, because it trundled off again without another word. Harkness felt some sympathy towards it, knowing it must have been going through those exact same motions with every dumb bastard who wandered in there for over two hundred years.

Thinking about all that kept him somewhat distracted as he took off his combat armor. Which meant he didn't notice that Ted was openly staring at him until he straightened and reached for the Vault jumpsuit again. He blinked right back. "What?"

"Huh? Oh, uhh." Ted looked away quickly. "Nothing. Absolutely nothing."

Harkness frowned. "Didn't seem like nothing."

Biting his lip, Ted slowly turned his head and resumed staring. "Well, it's just..." He trailed off. Then he gestured uselessly to Harkness. "I mean, _damn_ , man. You're really anatomically correct, aren't you?"

Well... Yes? Was he not supposed to be?

\---

"Gotta say, chief," Ted said approvingly, "never seen someone fill out a Vault suit quite that well."

It seemed to Harkness like Ted was getting a bit less hesitant in making statements like that. Statements that were... Complimentary? Admiring? Harkness wasn't sure whether he liked it or not, but he wasn't about to tell the kid to stop. It was, after all, more data.

His human memories told him that such statements could be taken as flirting, but he didn't want to... To what? Get his hopes up? Over what? What was he even hoping for at that point? Nothing tangible. Certainly nothing that it was rational for him to hope for.

By that point they were deep in the heart of the Vault. Ted had found the room with the Tranquility Loungers - basically a bunch of virtual reality stasis pods - and he'd promptly jammed a pipe he'd found into the workings of the door to make sure they weren't disturbed by curious robobrains. Then he'd checked all the monitoring stations attatched to the pods and found that, while two pods were indeed empty, only one of them was working.

He'd gotten to work trying to fix the second to the best of his ability, but both of them knew that Harkness probably wouldn't be compatible with the VR tech anyway. And even if he were, it could damage him.

They both knew that. Still, Ted was trying to make it happen anyway, and Harkness wasn't stopping him.

"So, Harkness," the Vaultie began. "Have you thought about how you're gonna explain your presence to my old man?"

Harkness, leaned heavily against the supercomputer that took up the center of the room, shook his head. "No. Have you?"

"Well, I figure we've got three options we could try, two he'd believe, and one that won't bite you in the ass too badly." Ted put down a socket wrench and went instead for a screwdriver, not taking his eyes off of his work at all. "If you don't like any of it, you could always just leave."

Very little could get Harkness to leave short of the Institute breaking down the door. "What would you suggest, then?"

"First off, we could tell him I paid you to come with me." Reaching his free hand into the innards of the VR pod, Ted yanked out a whole mess of wires and started picking through them, examining each in turn. "But I doubt he'll believe that, since he'd have to think I had enough caps to be able to get you away from Rivet City. Not only that, but it'd make it seem like you were the kind of guy whose loyalty could be bought, which could suck for you."

"What about the other two options?"

"Option two is that we tell him we're sleeping together." Silence stretched on for over half a minute after that before he spoke again. "--seriously, Hark. It's probably what half of Rivet City is thinking by now."

For almost a minute, all Harkness could do was stare. Too many of his processes had locked up for him to do much more. When he found his voice again, it sounded strained even to his own ears. "People think we're--" attatched? Intimate? _And Ted was all right with that?_

"Better than them thinking you're a robot. If anything it disproves the whole android thing. Robots don't sneak off to libraries with Vault kids to get laid."

But they hadn't-- They weren't! Why was Ted so laid-back about this? "And you'd be willing to tell your father that?"

"There's the hitch, see. I'm nineteen, and you look like you're in your thirties. He's kinda traditional, so he'd think you were taking advantage. Also, he thought - well, I did too - that I'd be marrying this girl I knew. I think he wanted me to settle down and stop being crazy." Ted gestured with a pair of wire cutters as he spoke. "Anyway, since he knows Doctor Li, I bet word would get around. It could ruin you back home."

Harkness was hardly thinking about that. His mind was sticking on other things. "What was she like?"

"Huh? Who, the girl?" Ted glanced up from his work long enough to catch an affirming nod from Harkness. He must've seen something else in the security chief's expression, too; he got that slow, sad smile as he went back to trying to rewire the VR pod. "Hah. Nothing like you. I can safely say you're the most aryan-looking person I've ever considered sleeping with."

"I-- _what?_ "

"Well, I'd say whitest, but I really can't say someone's white-looking with a straight face."

That was so far from what Harkness was asking. So very, very far from it. Ted was going to make Harkness clarify the statement, wasn't he? "Are you propositioning me?"

Ted snickered to himself. "Don't worry, Hark. I didn't mean anything by it. You're easy on the eyes, but... Yeah, I'm not about to make a move on you or something."

Not about to-- wait, so did he actually want something resembling human intimacy or didn't he? Was he all right with the thought of other people assuming they were intimate because he wouldn't mind it if they were, or was he just that uncharacteristically calm about it? For a while, all Harkness could do was stare; he had too many questions and no idea how to word them. And that wasn't even beginning to get into the questions he had yet to direct at himself.

He was starting to feel like he might be overheating again. So much new information, so many things he hadn't considered. He-- he had experience with intimacy. As an android it had often involved a loss of control, with every reaction being tested to make sure he operated at peak efficiency. It was clinical, sterile. He didn't enjoy dwelling on it.

But his human memories told him it wasn't supposed to be like that, so... Maybe? Not that those memories made it seem all that desirable. Pleasant, but messy. And that human drive that led to them wanting to have it so often seemed inconvenient even at the best of times.

"Ah, shit," Ted muttered eventually, smacking the broken pod with his socket wrench. "Sorry, chief. Even I can't get this piece of shit working again."

"It's fine," Harkness made himself say, even as it sank in that Ted was about to do this potentially dangerous virtual reality thing alone. Even though he knew he couldn't follow. It'd be fine. It would have to be. Either Ted could take care of himself or he couldn't. Harkness couldn't protect him.

Ted smiled in that sad way, heaving himself up and coming over to where Harkness stood so he could pat the android on the shoulder. "Hey. I'll be okay, don't worry."

Right. He'd go in, get his father, and get out. Even though most of the other pods listed their occupants as being deceased, yet still having vital signs. Human confidence worked via some kind of strange backwards insane moon logic, didn't it? Harkness took a steadying breath. "What-- what was the third option?"

"You tell him the truth," Ted replied. Then he turned his back on Harkness to head for the actually functional unoccupied pod.

And Harkness was left alone.

 


	12. intermission: just stay quiet and get fired up

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Fucking jingly-ass brainwashy bullshit music...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here we have our first chapter from Ted's point of view.

He'd always wondered what virtual reality would be like.

Not that he'd be up for it in the long term. Fuck no. Ted figured that'd be like having his eyes stapled open as he was forced to read books for all of eternity; much as he loved to read, he needed a break every so often. Nah, it was the idea of VR that appealed to him. Wouldn't it be kickass to be able to use that shit to learn? To data-dump things into a person's head without them having to go through the motions in real-time?

So basically, yeah, he could get behind this whole VR thing _in theory_.

In practice though? He'd really rather do without the brainwashy jingly cute music. Really, really did not like that shit. It was the first thing to greet his simulated senses after he jacked in and it made him want to punch whoever thought it was a good idea right in the teeth.

The second thing he noticed was that he was a good deal shorter than he remembered being. He could tell because everything seemed to be made for people who were taller than him. As in adults. As in his avatar in this fucked up greyscale pseudo-suburbia was probably that of a child.

Scratch going for the teeth. He was going to punch whoever was in charge right in the nuts for making him be fucking ten years old all over again. And it'd be their own goddamn fault for making his avatar so short, those giggling assclowns. He could only be expected to punch whatever was at his eye level.

Naturally, he didn't have a pip-boy. Of course. He hadn't really expected to, but one could always hope, right? But nah. No pip-boy. Whatever, he'd done without one for the first ten years of his life. He could do without for a day.

Thus with his status confirmed as "probably only mostly boned", he approached the nearest person who looked like an adult, and asked them with his biggest, saddest eyes in his best approximation of a cute voice - and Jesus-fucking-Christ his voice was not what he remembered it being, whoever had stuck him in a child avatar could seriously die in a fire, he would have no problems with that whatsoever - where his father was.

The adult, who seemed to be a kindly and tired old man, patted him on the head and told him to go talk to some chick. Ted huffed and resisted the urge to stomp on the old man's foot.

He talked to some other folks - a middle-aged woman, another slightly younger woman, some chubby-cheeked kid running a lemonade stand, another old man, and a somewhat-less-old man - and all of them were about as much help as the first old man had been. "I'm sure your father will turn up," they said like fucking clockwork. "Have you talked to Betty?"

No, he hadn't talked to fucking Betty. Who the hell was that and why should he care? More than that, why did everyone else care? A thought was itching at the back of his mind, but he needed more evidence.

He went to talk to the little kid at the lemonade stand again. "Hey. Pretty cool simulation, huh?"

The kid crinkled his nose. "What? You're weird."

Welp. That pretty much answered that, didn't it?

Ted figured he had to have wasted at least a half hour wandering around, all while blatantly ignoring the playground that sat smack in the middle of the cul-de-sac and trying to push the jingly music (that played from every goddamn radio in the place simultaneously) out of his mind. He had a feeling that he didn't want to go where the townsfolk were directing him. Hell, the whole place just felt... Off. It creeped him out. Add to that the weird groupthink that the people seemed to have going on, and it made him all kinds of uncomfortable.

But he had to save his dad. Because his dad could be an aloof dick sometimes, but no one could really argue that the "clean water for everyone" thing was a bad idea without also trying to justify why they hated the idea of people not having mutant freakish death-cancer or tapeworms or dysentery. Clean water was used as the foundation for whole empires, right alongside things like roads or wheels or currency.

That, and he missed clean showers.

Sighing dejectedly, he finally turned and headed reluctantly for the playground, unable to shake the feeling that someone was dicking with him.

\---

"Hi there!" the little girl before him chirped, smiling sweetly. "You must be new. I'm Betty."

Ted decided from the start that he didn't like her. Even if she weren't perky, she had a dog with her. And Ted didn't like people who did shit like putting too-tight collars attatched to bulky-but-short chains on their dogs. That was just mean. Especially with a big dog like that. Shit, he missed poor Dogmeat. What a loyal, sweet mutt. "Hey, yeah. Hi. Have you seen my dad?"

The girl pursed her lips, considering the question. "Mmm... I dunno. What's he like?"

"Little over fifty. Scientist type. Five-nine, greying hair, beard, dark brown eyes, average build, Asian." Well, mostly-Korean, but usually people didn't give two shits about the specifics when it came to things like that. He definitely didn't expect a little girl to know.

Wait, was this Betty even a little girl? He hadn't seen anyone that had matched her description in the VR pods, nor had he seen a "Betty" on any of the vitals monitors. Come to think of it, he hadn't exactly seen a dog, either. Was the dog simulated too, then? Besides, his own avatar didn't resemble what he looked like in the real world either.

It couldn't be too hard to alter a virtual appearance. It'd take more processing power to emulate something that didn't have a real likeness, but Ted had seen enough of Vault 112's supercomputers to know that it was entirely possible. Hell, hadn't Braun's work been the source of Hark's memory chip? This shit was probably on another level from what he'd seen before. He was tempted to ask for pointers.

He was dragged out of his reverie by Betty's high-pitched giggling. " _That's_ your daddy?"

Ugh. Maybe she was a simulation, too. He couldn't get quite as pissed off at something that was programmed to be deliberately annoying. "Yeah, I know, we look nothing alike." As if he needed another reminder. "So do you know where he is or not?"

"Tell you what," Betty purred, sounding less like a little girl and more like a cartoon cat that had found a mouse. "If you play a game with me, I'll answer one question for you."

Ted's jaw was starting to ache from how tense it was. "I don't have time for your games, kid. I just wanna get my dad and go."

Betty narrowed her eyes. "I _said_ I want to play a game."

"Look, kid. I really don't have time for this, all right?" He was losing patience. Quickly. Even at the best of times he was bad at being polite. "I've got shit to do, and so does my dad. Neither of us should be wasting time with a computer's dumbass games."

"I **said** I want to play a **game** ," Betty insisted, glaring at him for a moment before reverting to her default sweet smile. "It's simple. All you have to do is make Timmy Neusbaum cry."

Ted let out a slow breath, forcing himself to look away before he could do something he might regret. He glanced at the dog instead, peering into those big sad puppy-eyes as if they might have the answers. They didn't. The dog just looked tired and unhappy.

Poor miserable pup. All chained up with nowhere to run and nothing to chase. Even before that infection in his paw - even scrawny as he'd been - Dogmeat had been a happy dog. Moira had made a habit of sneaking him treats while he kept Ted company through medication trials. It pained Ted to see another dog in such a sorry state.

"...Shit. Lemonade stand kid, right?" All Ted had to do was make him cry? That was it?

Betty practically beamed at him. "Yep!"

"All right." Wasn't like Ted didn't have experience with making little kids cry. "Five minutes and I'll be back. You better keep your end of the deal, brat."

The girl only giggled, her pigtails bouncing as she clapped her hands together in glee.

\---

As a kid, Ted had been a nasty little shit who had gotten into fights with what his father and the Overseer would call alarming regularity. So even with the simulated physical appearance and capability of a ten-year-old, he was still pretty damn good with his fists when it came down to it. That didn't make it pleasant or cathartic to throw a hard uppercut at Timmy Neusbaum's jaw, but it did mean that he only had to throw the one punch.

He was a dick, but he wasn't a bully. That was Butchie's thing. Poor Timmy took it about as well as expected, tumbling to the ground and landing heavily and awkwardly enough that scraped elbows were a certainty. He stared up at Ted with something akin to betrayal, tears welling up in his eyes as he clutched at the injured side of his face. He was snuffling by the time he got up, and full-on bawling by the time he fled inside, probably to hide under his mom's skirt and wibble at her.

If Ted had acted like that growing up, he would've been torn apart. He knew it was just a simulation, yeah, but... Christ, man. Had the kid started out like that, and the Vault's computers had just preserved it? Or had he been made that way by whoever or whatever was in charge?

This whole mess was just twisted as all fuck.

Flexing his right hand - which the simulation was good enough to provide a nice bruised-knuckles feeling for, how fucking wonderful - he marched right back over to Betty's playground in the middle of the cul-de-sac, finding her sitting on one of the swings and kicking her feet back and forth while she hummed along to the brainwashy music on the radio.

He came to a halt a few feet away and waited for several moments. When no greeting came, he rolled his eyes and gave in. "I played your goddamn game, kid," he ground out. "Now it's your turn to honor our deal."

Betty stopped humming to pout at him. "Such a brutish boy," she said, half to herself. Her voice had a strange quality to it, one Ted couldn't place. As if gravity itself obeyed her, the swing came to an abrupt halt and she stood, dusting off her floral-print skirt daintily. "But you did as you were told, even if you were crude about it. Ask your question."

It would be an understatement for Ted to say he was uncomfortable then. The hairs on the back of his neck stood on end, and all his senses were on high alert. "Alright, creepy chick. Where's my dad?"

She smiled again. Ted hated that smile. "Oh, he's here."

"Great. Tell me where he is and I'll get out of your hair."

Betty wagged a finger and _tsk_ ed at him. "Now that's not fair. I said I'd answer one question."

Ted's lips curled in a snarl. He was really losing patience with this girl. "Bullshit. I played your stupid fucking game, and now you tell me what I want to know."

"Or you'll do what?" Something else filtered through in Betty's voice, something that wasn't girlish or cute at all. Like her voice was overlaying another person's. "You can't do anything here. This place is mine. You'll do as I say."

Betty wasn't a little girl at all, was she? She wasn't even a computer program. She was reacting too humanly. Too much like a cruel adult. The voice glitch just confirmed it, stripping away the last of Ted's reservations that had been keeping a lid on his temper. He was done with people fucking around with him, done with this place. Done with the asinine, petty little games.

He took a full-force swing at "Betty" with his left hand, as was his habit after years of wearing a heavy pip-boy on that arm. He felt the blow connect, the impact of his knuckles smashing into bone and cartilege jarring his hand. "Betty" staggered, but didn't fall; he aimed a second punch, a hard right hook, at that false button nose. If he felt it, then whoever it was that was behind that avatar had to feel it, too--

What happened next knocked the breath out of him. His second swing didn't connect; instead, his whole body jerked as electricity coursed through him, burning his nerves from the inside with white-hot pain. It blanked his thoughts, choked his voice, seized his chest like a heart attack.

Ted came back to himself breathing hard, sucking simulated air into his simulated lungs, clutching his chest and barely able to keep his legs from buckling. Not dead, but way too close to the possibility for comfort. If "Betty" wanted him dead, she probably could have killed him. What she'd been doing was punishment.

Nearby, "Betty" burst into another fit of giggles. Ted had to resist the urge to try and beat that smug brat's face in; Harkness would probably be upset if he didn't come back.

He had to be smart about this.

 


	13. 11: romance

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Humans are so contradictory.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the longest chapter so far. Possibly the longest single chapter of anything I've written that isn't a straight-up one shot. I sincerely doubt that any of the others will be this long. I enjoyed reading it, I enjoyed writing it, and I think it turned out well. But you guys? I'm not sure what you'll think. It's a departure from the norm for me. It isn't funny. You guys might not like that. But hell, I got the plot stuff out of the way.
> 
> If you find mistakes, don't be afraid to point them out. I proofread this myself and I'm absolutely horrible at catching shit.

Harkness tried to stop counting the hours (minutes, seconds, _milliseconds_ ) that had passed since Ted had gotten into that VR pod. He tried. He reminded himself that humans did not count time like that. Humans did not have the sort of processing speed he did and did not operate within the same parameters. Even human thoughts had a greater latency than his own thoughts did. By keeping track so closely, he was being unreasonable in his standards. His mounting concern as more time passed was therefore also unreasonable.

He tried, and he failed. Miserably.

For a while he'd thought that sleeping might pass the time better. Or more accurately, entering into a blacked out sleep-mode where he slipped into an unaware state, used only minimal resources, and took the opportunity to recharge. The smallest out-of-the-ordinary _beep_ from one of the terminals was able to wake him. From that point on he was on high alert; the terminal that had beeped was Ted's, and his vitals had gone crazy just long enough for the system to raise a minor alarm.

Whoever had designed the damn thing must not have thought that a spike followed by a sudden plummet was worth more than a beep. Harkness was quietly livid. Had they not seen back then that lives of people in their system were precious things that needed to be preserved? Was that not the point of the Vaults to begin with?

Time wore on, and his patience wore thin. His thoughts were going in anxious circles again. Spirals of useless logic that only made him angry at himself and his own inability to do anything. He didn't have a damn clue what was going on in there. Couldn't. Worse still that he knew Ted's logic had been sound when he'd told Harkness not to follow. Meanwhile it was logic that kept Harkness from ripping the pod open and pulling his human out himself.

But however angry he was at himself, at humanity, at the machine, at logic itself-- he wasn't angry at Ted. Not really. Upset with him for being reckless and having nothing in the way of self-preservation instincts - weren't humans supposed to have those? - but not truly mad at him. Which was possibly the most illogical thing of all.

Then the other pods started up with that fucking beeping from earlier - a chorus of beeps! - and Harkness stopped pacing around the room as he felt that quiet rising panic again.

His feet carried him instead to Ted's terminal. No beep. A mild elevation in heartrate and blood pressure, but stress levels were nominal according to the machine. He felt some of the tension leave him, but only some; he was still keyed-up enough that the sound of the airtight seals opening on the pod behind him was able to startle him. The fraction of a second it took to realize what was happening felt like a fraction of a second wasted, every millimeter of distance between him and the VR pod being a millimeter too far.

Ted pushed himself up from the chair in the pod and staggered, looking groggy and disoriented. When he stumbled out, Harkness was there to catch him.

"Oof," said the warm weight in Harkness's arms, smelling like sweat and leather and aftershave. Tired, steely eyes blinked up at him for a minute before a smile made the corners of those eyes crinkle with amusement. "Hey," Ted mumbled.

And Harkness, unable to find the words for what he wanted, pulled his small malfunctioning human tight against his chest. Pressed his face into soft, colorless hair. Warm, breathing, _alive_. That was all that mattered.

He must have made a noise or done something amusing, because Ted was only still for two-point-three seconds before he chuckled and shook his head, lifting his arms to bring them around the security chief's much broader form. "You big ol' sap," he said teasingly. "Seriously, what am I gonna do with you?"

Harkness let out a huff of breath that was just short of a laugh and just held the Vaultie close, relaxing as all his processes settled back into something like normalcy. "You scared me," he admitted, quiet and hesitant. He didn't pull away, though; since Ted hadn't reacted negatively, that meant that the physical contact was acceptable. And honestly, he didn't want to let go yet.

He could hear the smile in Ted's voice when the kid responded. "I know," he said. A hand smoothed over Harkness's back, rubbing in gentle circles through the material of the jumpsuit he still wore. "Thought about that, y'know? I mean, like hell I was gonna die in there and leave you behind out here. Can't have my favorite android getting all sad about me, right?"

There was so much that Harkness wanted to say. So much that he could say in response to that alone, in fact. He could even make a joke - maybe some comment about that _favorite android_ remark and him being the only android the kid knew - and it might make Ted laugh. He-- he liked listening to that. That laugh. It was so open. So honest. Harkness wanted to be that honest. He wished words and feelings and sentiment came to him that easily.

But then Ted drew away from him. Stepped back. Looked up with those eyes while fragile hands slid away. And Harkness lost what words he might've had, because he saw something like regret in those eyes.

What-- why? Why did it look like-- had Harkness done something wrong? Had he made a mistake somehow? Ted tipped his head up and offered up a lopsided grin, but it only made the confusion worse. It wasn't a real grin. The regret was still there, making it look wrong and forced. So why...?

"Sorry," he told Harkness. "Almost got ahead of myself there." Then Ted separated from him completely, leaving him behind for the unmistakable sound of another pod's seals opening.

Right. They had come here for a reason. Harkness hadn't even been thinking about that.

\---

The shocking thing wasn't that Doctor James Davies didn't look like his son. It was that Harkness hadn't realized that he'd met the man before.

Months ago, a man in a Vault 101 jumpsuit had come to Rivet City with a winning smile and a request to be allowed in. He was there to see Madison Li. At the time, Harkness had still been under the impression that he was human; as a human, he'd mistrusted this stranger immediately. Too friendly, too clever, and too good at making his own damn men lower their guard by being a smooth-talker. If it hadn't proven true that James Davies did indeed know Doctor Li, Harkness wouldn't have needed much provocation to throw the man overboard.

James Davies had an easy smile, a smooth laugh, and a lazy posture that made him disarming to look at and listen to. Dark brown monolid eyes, dark hair streaked with grey, and a lean build marked him as Asian, at least in part. He had a round face and a relatively neat beard to add to that overall air of friendliness, and his skin had a healthy tan to it. In the months since Harkness had seen the man last, none of that had changed.

If it weren't for the fact that Harkness could calculate the proportions of their respective features, he'd say that Ted looked nothing like his father. As things stood, Harkness was quietly glad that his android nature made things like that a good deal easier so he could save himself the probable embarassment of asking stupid questions.

James Davies slid out of the VR pod with about as much disorientation as his son had, landing heavily on his feet and catching himself against the side of it with a woozy shake of his head. Ted was at his side in moments; Harkness was slower and more cautious in his approach.

"Dad, holy shit Dad are you okay--" Ted babbled. He caught his father by the arms to help steady him.

The older man blinked as he got his bearings. "What... Theodore?"

Ted grinned. "Yeah. It's me."

"You... So it _was_ you in there." The man sagged. "You saved me, but-- but what are you _doing_ here?"

"Rescuing your dumb ass." Ted's expression lost some of its mirth. "I came to get you."

"And my 'arse' appreciates it to be sure, but that's hardly the point." A disapproving frown creased the doctor's features. "You're supposed to be in the Vault where it's safe."

"Technically I'm in a Vault right now. Does that count?"

James didn't appreciate the humor. "Don't you get smart with me, Theodore," he said in an admonishing tone.

And Ted did something that Harkness hadn't seen before: he _obeyed_. Sure, he sighed and rolled his eyes. He looked annoyed and petulant and mutinous. But he wasn't saying another word, either. No snark, no back-talk. Nothing. That hadn't happened before, at least not where Harkness could witness it.

"Now then," the doctor began, pulling Harkness from his thoughts. "A bit far from Rivet City, aren't you, Chief Harkness?"

Harkness straightened his own posture to something a bit more respectful, offering a nod. He should at least try to be polite. This was a big deal for Ted. "Your son asked me to come, Doctor."

"Did he, now?" The doctor raised his eyebrows. "And why would the chief of security of Rivet City agree to going traipsing across the wastes at the side of a young man who clearly has no regard for his own safety?" He gave his son a stern frown, and Ted shrugged off the comment.

What the hell? It was like Ted was letting him get away with saying these things. Thinking these things. Harkness narrowed his eyes at the older man. "With respect, sir," he said, "it's been my experience that Ted is perfectly capable of taking care of himself, and the fact that he asked me to come with him shows what level of precautionary measures he's willing to take regardless."

Ted looked at Harkness sharply, blinking. He must not have expected to be defended. Harkness wondered at that. Meanwhile, James was unimpressed. "That doesn't answer my question, Harkness," the doctor said.

No, it didn't. Because Harkness was still trying to decide whether or not he trusted the father as much as he trusted the son. "I don't like loaded questions," he replied instead.

The doctor frowned even more deeply. "Then I'll put it simply: why are you here?"

"I told you. I'm here because Ted asked me to come." The whole conversation bothered Harkness. Irritated him in a way he hadn't expected. He had thought that since Ted wanted to rescue his father, the man must be worth the rescue. And maybe he was. Maybe Harkness was being irrational again. But to see Ted so-- so--

Submissive. That was the right word.

But the older man was still staring at him expectantly, waiting for some kind of elaboration. It wasn't enough that Ted had asked him to come, then. There had to be a reason. Some kind of motive. Ted had said as much before, hadn't he? "He mentioned something about a purifier," Harkness said, "and said it could help the whole DC metro area. I assume that includes Rivet City."

James blinked at Harkness, before turning his head to peer at his son. "You know about Project Purity? How? Did Madison tell you?"

"No," Ted muttered darkly. "Found your notes."

"My n... Ah. Right." Something about that statement gave the older man pause. "I see." His gaze fell on Harkness again. "But that doesn't explain why you felt you could trust the word of a nineteen year old."

Harkness's brow furrowed. He didn't want to tell Ted's father everything. Didn't trust him, for one thing. Nothing about the conversation had made a positive impression. "Honestly, Doctor, nothing I could do would measure up for what your son's been able to do for me." Was that enough? No, he was still being frowned at. Shit. "I haven't met anyone else who-- who treats people like me quite like he does. It's because of him that I'm--" Harkness hesitated, feeling a hitch in his processes, a trace of added latency brought on by old fears, "--free, right now."

"You were a slave?" the doctor asked quickly, dubious. Well, in a way, but... Shit. He was going to ask more questions, wasn't he? Ted had been right; his father was smart. And Harkness wasn't good enough at talking people in circles to mislead him.

"I'm--" the words caught in his throat, the same way they had when he'd put them to a holotape and sent them out into the wasteland as a cry for help at the start of it all, "--I'm an android."

Silence fell for fourteen-point-one seconds.

"Well." Ted's father folded his arms. "Either this is a very elaborate hoax, or you're totally sincere about this."

It was Harkness's turn to stare. "You believe me?"

"I didn't say that, I said you're being sincere." The doctor smiled. "It's also possible that you're utterly mad."

Ted interrupted with a snort. "You could ask him to prove it."

"Theodore, be reasonable. Short of cutting him open, there's no--" But Ted was ignoring his father, pulling a wrench from his belt and striding over to Harkness. "What in God's name are you thinking?"

"You'll see," Ted responded cryptically. He handed the wrench to Harkness. "Can you bend that?"

Actually, yes. Harkness felt a little of the tension leave him at the prospect of something that was a physical exercise rather than a mental one. He wasn't so good at talking to people; bending steel was easy in comparison. And because it was a demonstration of his capabilities as an android, he didn't have to put any extra effort into calculating how much he'd have to hold his strength back to appear to have human limitations.

In fact, the wrench gave out before he did; its tensile strength didn't allow for it to bend into an acute angle, and it snapped cleanly down the middle before it was even close to being perpendicular to itself. Looking satisfied, Ted took the two halves from him and held them up for his father to see. "There. Happy?"

The doctor openly gawked at Harkness. "I'll be damned."

Ted glanced up at Harkness with something like pride before returning to his father's side. "Now stop fucking bugging him about it. You're making him uncomfortable."

"Language, Theodore," Ted's father chided. But from the way he side-eyed Harkness, the point had been made.

\---

They conversed. Harkness let them. He made the excuse that it felt like it wouldn't be right to intrude. As silently as he could manage - he didn't want to interrupt more than he likely already had - he opened up the door that Ted had wedged shut previously and headed out into the corridor, only to be greeted by a pile-up of robobrains placidly declaring that they'd detected an obstruction.

Harkness smirked to himself. Leave it to Ted to screw up what was likely two hundred years of pathfinding protocols.

Shrugging it off, he sidestepped the robotic traffic jam and made his way to a stairwell he'd seen on the way in. Vaults had supplies, and Ted's father hadn't looked like he was armed. He'd need a weapon. Food, too. Water. Maybe this place even had some armor stashed somewhere. Not that Harkness was hoping for a set of T51-b power armor, but even some simple combat armor or a bulletproof vest would be better than nothing. He might even be able to find where the robobrain stewards had taken the combat armor he'd had on previously.

He also wanted to be anywhere other than in the same room as Ted's father, because his own temper had yet to cool down after the man had launched into a lecture about Ted's safety and tried to drag Harkness into it to get Ted to "see reason". As if Harkness thought that telling someone who used microfusion cells as makeshift grenades that they couldn't go outside during the day because he might get a little sunburn was reasonable.

No. That was not how logic worked. James Davies did not get to decide how logic worked. He did not get to decide how his son worked, either, nor did he get to say what Ted could and couldn't handle. Protectiveness didn't justify it.

Harkness saw what was happening. It was about control. Ted couldn't be controlled. Of course not. He couldn't be made to do what his father saw as best for him. So the next best thing was clearly to bully and manipulate him into it. By Ted's reactions, it seemed to be working; Harkness had never seen him so effectively cowed. It was possible that his father didn't realize what was going on, but Harkness saw through it.

Once he had, that was when he'd needed to leave the room. He'd realized then why Ted had said once that he might understand too well. Because he did understand. He'd made the last connections. Filled in the final logical gaps. Harkness had all the data he needed to form his final conclusions. His small, malfunctioning human made sense to him, in a way that made his processes stutter so profoundly that he'd forgotten to breathe for a few hundredths of a second before he'd thought to excuse himself.

They were the same, weren't they? Ted was--

Harkness' train of thought was interrupted by footsteps in the hall behind him. Almost at the top of the stairs himself, he paused long enough to turn and take a glance back.

A white shock of hair was the first thing that caught his eye. "Hark! Hey." The moment Ted was around the corner, he started coming up the stairs after Harkness, smirking. "Think I wouldn't notice you wandering off like that?"

Right. Of course Ted would see through it. Not that Harkness minded; at least it was Ted that had come after him and not the doctor. "No," he admitted. He turned back to the task at hand, coming to the top of the stairs and heading down the following corridor. "Thought you'd be better off talking to him one-on-one, that's all."

"No, I get it, it's okay. I know how hard that had to be. I mean, he kinda backed you into a corner." Ted caught up by taking the steps two at a time, almost tripping over himself as he reached the top of the stairwell and catching himself on a pipe on the wall with a squawk. "Sorry about that."

Harkness let out a slow breath. "That's not it." He came to a door several meters off - labelled as [ _STORAGE_ ] in block capitals on a light over the door - and tried to open it with the nearby button that would seem to do so. When the button only buzzed at him in response, he frowned at it. Should he try to pry it open? He probably could. Hell, he could punch a hole in it if he wanted.

Before he could try, Ted stepped up to the button with a screwdriver in hand. "Uh-huh," he said as he popped the button's cover off and began messing with wires. "So what is it?"

"Complicated," Harkness replied. A thought occurred to him. "Did you take your meds?"

"Sure, 'cause that's not an obvious dodge at all. Also? Yes. Took 'em dry and it sucked balls." There was a spark from the junction box and Ted yelped, pulling his hand back to suck on his finger and pout. Not that zapping one of his fingers on a live wire stopped him from going right back to digging in the junction box a few seconds later. "Look, for what it's worth, it's fine if you don't wanna talk about it."

No, that wasn't it either. Well, maybe it was. A little bit. Harkness frowned to himself. "I don't-- know how to say it. Not without hurting you."

Ted snorted. "I'm not gonna throw a fit at you for telling the truth, Hark."

It was easy to say a thing like that, but Harkness wasn't so sure. "How can you know that if you don't know what the truth is?"

"Simple. I know you." A few moments of tinkering later, and the heavy steel door slid open. "Ahah! There."

Harkness was the first into the room. No robobrains, not even so much as a security camera. Just lockers, boxes, and a shelving unit stacked piled high with energy packs, ammo, and pharmaceuticals. Good. "You won't tell your father either?" he asked, still uncertain.

The Vaultie followed him in and went to work on one of the lockers with a bobby pin pulled from some pocket or another. "Nope."

"Then..." Okay. Harkness could trust that. "I can't deal with the way he treats you," he said eventually. He rooted around in his memory banks for an appropriate human phrase. "Hits a little close to home."

For once, Ted looked up from his work to peer at Harkness curiously. "What, y'mean like the Institute treated you?"

"In a sense." Harkness went to the shelf to look for ammo for the magnum, sorting through boxes and glancing at labels. The particulate count in the air was high; it was dusty in that part of the Vault. "When I hunted down other synths, there was always someone who would treat it as a sort of warning to the rest. Like it was the runner's fault for wanting to not be treated like--"

Ted caught the hesitation. "Talkative furniture?"

"Something like that." Metaphors were still difficult, but Harkness supposed that one could apply. "Wanting to live free wasn't something that the humans at the Institute could really understand. They were already free, because they were human. There was a place for them in the world. A comfortable one."

"And you think my father is like that."

Harkness nodded slowly. Another half-minute went by as Ted regarded him with knitted brows. Then the Vaultie sighed and pocketed his bobby pin, giving up on the locker in favor of turning to face Harkness completely. Harkness followed suit without comment.

"You're not wrong," he said quietly, with a kind of vulnerability to his features that made Harkness ache.

Shit. He shouldn't have said anything. "I'm sorry."

"Don't be. Nothing to be sorry about."

"There is. I hurt you."

"You didn't hurt me, I just..." Ted trailed off, averting his eyes and lifting one hand to rub at the back of his neck. "You're the first person to actually get that, y'know?"

That couldn't be right. Harkness had only known him for a bit over a month. And he might be the only android Ted knew, but he wasn't the only machine. Besides, there had to be more malfunctioning humans. Ones who understood. Harkness couldn't be the only one. He was-- inadequate. Maybe he always would be. There would always be fundamental differences between them. Gaps in his understanding. It couldn't possibly be ideal, could it?

Ted bit his lower lip gently after things went silent between them. It took him several seconds to speak again and fill that silence. "Hey," he began, "did you, uh... Did you mean what you said back there? To my father, I mean."

Harkness didn't even have to think hard on his answer to that. "Yes." Maybe Ted had never had anyone say things like that about him. Had no one ever seen him that way? Was every human coded to see only the malfunctions?

"Alright. Okay." Ted's hands fell to his sides, fidgeting with the pockets of his jumpsuit. "Then is it, uhm... Is it okay if I do something that's, uh. A bit human, I guess?"

"That's never stopped you before," Harkness noted.

"Hah. Right, yeah, I know. I just have to-- okay, look, whatever. Just, if you don't like it then consider this an apology in advance, okay? A-and if it's not your thing, i-if you don't..." The Vaultie trailed off with an irritable sigh, shaking his head quickly. "Agh, damn it. Y'know what? Fuck it, I'm doing it."

Then Ted surged forward. Closed what distance there was between them. Cold hands came up to pull Harkness down, one in his hair and one at the back of his neck. His system raised an alarm, but he ignored it; in that moment, warm lips collided with his.

Every one of his processes stuttered at the contact, the pressure. Soft, yet forceful. His thoughts became fragmented - the pieces scattered by day-old stubble and the scrape of teeth against his lower lip - and then overtaken completely by a tightened grip in his hair and a muffled sound almost like a whimper--

It stopped as suddenly as it had begun, leaving Harkness dazed; he opened his eyes (when had he closed them?) to see Ted pulling away so quickly that his back hit the lockers behind him audibly.

"Sorry, I-I shouldn't have done that, it's stupid, I shouldn't-- I-I mean you're, you're not... A-and that's not the kinda thing I should e-expect from you--" He was babbling. Disjointed nonsense words and sentences, as distraught as Harkness had ever heard him. "I'm not trying to make you do anything you don't want, that's not what I, I mean I didn't want to-- oh Christ I practically just assaulted you with that, didn't I..."

Digging around for a proper response took far longer than Harkness wanted it to; he had to poke his human memories for it, because his system and his experiences as an android had no answers. Further complicating matters was that the human memories only dealt with women. There was no analogue to be found for what had just happened, not really (and especially not for the biting). By the time he settled on what to do - with no real certainty that it would help - Ted had gotten to the point that he'd stopped making eye contact completely, staring pointedly at the floor instead.

"I-I should probably just go, y'know? I'll just go find my dad, a-and we can get back to Rivet City and you can get back some other way, I won't be alone a-and you should be fine--"

"Ted," Harkness interjected. Watery eyes shifted to blink up at him and he fought the compulsion to flinch at the sight. He'd done that. His hesitation. His uncertainty. His _inhumanity_. It had made Ted think that nothing he'd done or said was appreciated or welcomed or wanted. Because the world had convinced Ted that he wasn't worth being wanted as himself. As a hero and an expert at problem solving, but not as a small, malfunctioning human.

But it was the small, malfunctioning human - not the hero that Three Dog crowed about over the radio on Bannon's shelf - who had been able to make Harkness feel at ease with being A3-21.

As gently as he could, Harkness took Ted's chin and tilted it upward. After that he made up for the rest of the seven inch height difference himself, bending down to finally - _finally_ \- return the favor. If he had enough capacity for irrational thought to form an attatchment, then he certainly had enough irrationality to appreciate the messy, pointless intimacy of a kiss or two.

 


	14. 12: mouth on fire

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Maybe understanding was a mutation, too.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Bit shorter chapter this time, since I didn't want to TL;DR you guys again. Also because I want to get the plot moving and I can't do that if Harkness is too busy being a cuddlybug.
> 
> Beta by Zoo. EVERYONE GO READ HER STOOF.

Kissing was completely novel to Harkness as a concept; actually getting a chance to try it was yielding a surprising amount of new data on human behavior. He was even learning new things about his own anatomy, as it never would have occurred to him that the inside of his mouth was that sensitive. Nor would he have realized that such a simple thing could make him feel so overheated, so... Disconnected.

It was interesting. Enlightening. In fact, he would welcome the chance to do more of it in the future for the sake of gathering data. For research. Right. Maybe he could convince Ted to do less biting next time. And maybe they could do it on a flat, horizontal surface, because Harkness was feeling an ache in his neck and shoulders from having to bend down so far.

Or he could pick Ted up, set him on an appropriately high surface, and kiss him that way. A countertop of average height would probably work. Maybe a chair? The main logistical difficulty had to do with the relative shortness of Ted's legs, so if Harkness were sitting down-- no, better yet. A barstool. Yes. That would work. Then the height problem would be solved, and Ted would have enough room for his hands to go wherever he wanted them to.

Because that was another thing Harkness had noticed: Ted liked to use his hands. They went _everywhere_. By the time he'd pulled away, he'd managed to unzip Harkness's jumpsuit down to his navel, the material hanging loose around his torso with his undershirt having ridden up to somewhere around his ribs. All because of those clever hands.

The whole affair was possibly the most informative six minutes Harkness had ever experienced. Hot breath ghosted across his face, a humid puff against his parted lips, and he decided on the spot that he would have to do it again at some point. If Ted would allow it.

"Holy shit," the Vaultie whispered, sagging back against the lockers. He was smiling, even flushed and breathing raggedly as he was. His fingers - which were no longer cold - toyed with the material of Harkness's open jumpsuit. "Hah. God. I think I have rug-burn on my face."

Harkness huffed a laugh, leaning forward until his forehead was resting against his human's. Gently, of course. Ted was fragile. "Saying I need to shave?" His own voice was rougher and lower than usual. Yet another new thing.

"Pff. We both do. Less so for me, but yeah." Ted tipped his head up so that the end of his nose touched Harkness's. His expression softened, and those clever hands moved to the security chief's jaw, tracing the lines of it thoughtfully.

Larger, less dextrous hands came up to the Vaultie's neck, cradling his face briefly as Harkness checked his human's pulse. He had half a mind to ask if Ted was all right, but his human memories were helpful enough to inform him that a thready pulse and uneven respiration were symtoms of heightened arousal as well as exertion. Not that it nullified the dangers completely, it just... Made it less of an issue.

Ted looked up then, uncertainty in his eyes; Harkness pulled his hands back, moving one to lean against the lockers. "Is-- is this okay?" Ted asked. "For you, I mean."

Really? He still had doubts? Harkness was caught between being amazed and exasperated. "It's fine," he answered. Maybe more forcefully than he needed to.

No, definitely more forcefully than he needed to. Ted flinched. His hands fell away, back to his sides. "Sorry."

Shit, that was the beginning of another downward spiral, wasn't it? Harkness sighed, drawing back to look Ted in the eyes. "Don't apologize." He-- he had to communicate. Say things. It wasn't something he was used to doing. "I didn't mind. Just--"

Ted perked up a bit. "Yeah?"

"--just. Less biting, next time. If-- if there is a next time." Harkness cringed at how odd his thoughts sounded when spoken aloud. Not that it kept him from continuing. He had to communicate things, or Ted would get lost in his own head and conclude that he meant less to Harkness than he actually did. "If we could do something about... Height? That would also be--" Harkness frowned as he searched for the right words.

"Less likely to put a crick in your neck?" Ted supplied, his smile coming back.

"Yes. That." And that very ache became that much more prevalent when Harkness straightened. He would be sore. His shoulders and back weren't meant to hold such positions; he just wasn't made to be flexible.

Ted seemed relieved. Amused, even. "Any other complaints I should be aware of?" he asked, reaching out to put Harkness's jumpsuit and undershirt back the way they'd been before.

"Nothing else at the moment." The rest of it was just questions, and thankfully, he wouldn't have to embarrass himself asking them; most of the answers could be found in his human memory files. Yes, humans did tend to get enthusiastic with their hands. Squeezing and groping and fondling were to be expected, even if such things implied a certain forwardness on the part of the human in question.

At least Ted had practiced enough restraint to not go for anything below the belt. Harkness preferred not having to deal with that sort of discomfort more than he already was.

Actually, that brought up another question. "And you? Any complaints?" Harkness asked, just as Ted was fixing the zipper of his jumpsuit; he noted that the latch only made it up to his collarbone when Ted was the one to decide where it ended up. Interesting. Did the Vaultie prefer seeing Harkness's skin exposed?

"What, me?" Ted scoffed. "Nah. Pin me to a locker any time you like, babe."

Harkness blinked a bit. "--is that something you're going to be calling me now?"

Task completed, Ted folded his arms and fixed Harkness with an incredulous look. Then his brows got a slight furrow to them and he cocked his head thoughtfully. "I'd make a comment about weird hang-ups, but. Thinking about it? Kinda derogatory. Gotta admit."

"I wasn't saying it was a... Hang-up." It had only been confusing. Not insulting. Harkness wasn't sure how one could find an insult in it, except to possibly find it demeaning-- maybe it implied that one was childlike? Cute?

He supposed that could also mean a lack of agency, or that the person in question needed protecting. But Ted had certainly gone to considerable lengths to keep Harkness safe and free - something that Harkness greatly appreciated - and as far as being childlike, there was still too much that he didn't know about humans for him to claim any sort of maturity. So none of the implications were wrong. Besides, his human memories told him it was a term of endearment. Which meant Ted thought he was endearing.

Well, obviously. Humans didn't kiss people they weren't fond of.

"So does that mean it's okay to call you that?" Ted asked.

Harkness considered. It didn't take much deliberation for him to come up with an answer. "Whatever you want."

Ted grinned broadly. "Careful, Hark. You'll give a guy ideas if you keep saying shit like that."

True. "Whatever you want that isn't biting," Harkness amended, and his human just laughed and tugged him down for another kiss.

\---

Of course, Ted's father couldn't be kept distracted forever. Eventually he came looking for them, his voice preceeding his footsteps, and Ted was snickering even as he cursed the man for always being such a "fucking cockblock". They straightened themselves out - Harkness moreso than Ted, seeing as Harkness wasn't the one who had gotten handsy - and Ted ventured out first to greet the man so that the two of them wouldn't be caught together.

A fine plan. All of it was Ted's. Harkness probably would have just gawked. He didn't really know what standard protocol was for humans that were intimate with each other. Didn't know if there actually was one. His human side was unhelpful in that regard, mostly because the human he'd gotten his identity from was a clod with no social skills to speak of. At least Ted seemed to know how to handle everything.

Knew how to kiss, too. Even if he didn't call it that. No, to him it was "making out like teenagers" or "sucking face" or "putting our tongues down each others' throats" because nothing could ever be called what it was when Ted was around.

Though once Ted was no longer present, Harkness found it difficult to concentrate on what he'd been doing before. He had been... Looking for supplies. Armor, weapons, rations. Right. He still needed to do that, but it was easier said than done. Particularly when he was distracted by all that new data he'd gathered.

For example, it was safe to say that Ted was attatched to him. A human being attatched to an android, while having full knowledge that the android was a machine-- it seemed impossible. From an outsider's perspective, it would make no sense. Harkness didn't really have feelings, not like humans did. His emotional responses were simulated. They were imitations of what emotions should feel like, reactions to stimuli that were as intricately programmed as his reflexes or his ability to feel pain.

He knew as much. And even though the knowledge didn't make make what he experienced seem any less real to him - he still felt things in his own way, and those emotions needed to be defined and dealt with as much as real ones did - it did make a difference to humans. He was only a machine. It wasn't real. They would always say that to him.

Ted had to know that. Had to. He knew what Harkness was - accomodated and allowed for every aspect of it he could think of - so he must know about that degree of seperation between them. Was he just ignoring it? Did he not care? Or was it something else-- something Harkness didn't know, a third or fourth option that hadn't been considered, like it had been with so many other questions Harkness had asked himself?

Beyond that, Harkness was certain of something else, too: he would have trouble going back to Rivet City's routine. Rivet City didn't carry the promise of gentle, fleeting touches. It wasn't a place for rough, demanding kisses that made him forget to breathe. It didn't offer him bleakly irreverant humor, or faintly nasal-sounding laughter followed by easy smiles. Its walls didn't make him feel safe like a warm embrace from spindly arms could.

Objectively, it was illogical. Subjectively, it made all the sense in the world. Because it was Ted. His human. His responsibility. His charge. His protector.

 _His_. That was certain, too.

A knock against the doorframe startled Harkness out of his thoughts, causing him to jerk upright as his hand went immediately for the magnum at his side.

James Davies held up his hands in a placating gesture. Of course it was him. "My apologies. I didn't mean to startle you."

"Right." Harkness frowned deeply, but he did let himself relax. A little. "Where's Ted?"

"Taking full advantage of the Vault's showers, I'd imagine. What with clean water being the luxury that it is." Davies smiled easily, much like his son did when in a good mood. Except Ted didn't give the impression that he was using it to seem less threatening. "Would you care to indulge as well? Assuming you'd have any use for such things, that is."

Ted's father moved his hands a lot as he spoke. Ducked his head. Shifted around a lot. Was he aware of it? Harkness had to wonder how much was calculated and how much was habit. "There's showers back at Rivet City," he said. "I'll be fine until we get back. Rather not waste time."

Davies tilted his head, fixing Harkness with a curious look. "You know, I get the feeling you don't like me very much." Then he smirked. "Ridiculous, I know."

"Not ridiculous at all," Harkness said flatly.

"For a person to program their robot to have preferences in terms of which humans they would rather be in the company of? Aside from the company of their creators or owners? Quite ridiculous." The doctor's look turned pitying. "Did Theodore reprogram you?"

Harkness stilled.

"Well, not that you would be able to answer that if he had," Davies continued. "I imagine he'd fill your head with all sorts of nonsense. The Three Laws and all that. Applied to himself, of course, else you wouldn't make a very effecti--"

"Stop talking." It came out as a growl; Harkness didn't want to hear any more. Didn't need to.

The doctor raised an eyebrow. "Excuse me?"

"Stop. _Talking._ " Harkness had no idea how Ted could take this sort of thing. He was-- he was _pissed_. Violently so. His tightly clenched fists shook with the effort it took to keep them still. If he took a swing, he wouldn't hold anything back. "How dare you," he snarled. "How _dare_ you. You think I'd be as easy to reprogram as a Handy? You think I'm that simple? That I don't possess the ability to be discerning in who I choose to trust? You think so little of your son that you see him as the kind of person to rewrite a person's entire _self_ just because he feels like it? You think he's that much of a sick, twisted bastard?"

James Davies only eyed Harkness as he spoke, reacting finally with a thin smile and a sigh. "I think that he has the mental capacity for extraordinary things, while also carrying the burdens of an unsound body and a personality disorder. One that could make him capable of quite terrible things," Ted's father said quietly, ducking his head. "As well as some very, very foolish things."

Harkness went rigid. "So all you see is how he's broken."

"It's hard not to," Davies admitted. "Though I'd hardly expect a machine to understand what it would be like to have to perform a life-saving operation or two on one's own son."

The only reason that statement made Harkness pause was because he was filing it away. He didn't care. It didn't make any of it less wrong. "And I never expected a human to understand what it was like to be treated like talkative furniture," he said grimly. "I think it's safe to say that the habit of exceeding my expectations doesn't run in the family."

After that, Harkness shoved his way past the doctor and out of the little storage room, its contents abandoned. Davies could get his own damn gun.


	15. 13: no reply

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Personal desire input error.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Summary courtesy of AntipodeanPixie@tumblr. NO BETA. I POSTED ANYWAY. 
> 
> I'm going to have a friend over next week. Don't expect too much to get done. If something does get done, it'll be as much of a surprise for me as it will be for you.
> 
> EDIT: OH. Before I forget again. http://lilibombe.tumblr.com/image/130245207251 LOOKIT. ONE OF MY FAVORITE ARTISTS MADE ME A THING. Holy shit it's amazing, you should definitely check her out.

Finding Ted took a while after that. Harkness had to get past the robobrain pile-up - some of them having fallen over by then, with all of them still calmly announcing that they had encountered an obstruction - and then he had to figure out which way the Vaultie had gone. In the end, he followed the distinct sound of rushing water being pumped through the Vault's vast network of pipes. Who else would be using running water, after all?

The twenty-two minutes it took him to find Ted also gave him a little time to cool off. Or at least it _should have_ given him time to cool off. What actually ended up happening was a whole lot of Harkness simmering in his own annoyance. He hit the button to open the door to what seemed to be the correct room only for a wall of steam to come rolling out, leaving condensation behind in its wake on every surface it touched; his system noted the spike in humidity and increase in air temperature and compensated by lowering his internal temperature to avoid overheating.

The room resembled something out of his human memories: a P.E. class locker room, with narrow stalls on one side, rows of lockers and benches on the other, and a number of sinks at the back of the room. It was a large room with a slightly concave floor, dotted with drains to get rid of any excess water. The floor was simple concrete with a hydrophobic coating. His human side recalled a certain distaste for pretty much every aspect, as well as an instance or two of wet slippery feet leading to a bloody nose from a jutting fixture.

One of the benches had a vault suit and a worn pair of briefs carelessly flung over it, with a pip-boy resting on top of the small pile along with a bunch of grenades, a bottle of water, and a laser pistol. Boots and socks were on the floor nearby. A bottle of aftershave, an electric razor, and a repurposed Rad-X bottle all sat on the edge of one of the sinks in the back. And a black jacket with a green snake embroidered on the back was hanging precariously off of the corner of a locker, the leather glistening with condensation.

"Someone there?" he heard over the sound of running water. "Dad, 'izzat you?"

Harkness relaxed somewhat. "It's me," he replied. "I can come back later if you want."

"Huh--? Oh, pff!" A hand poked up over one of the stalls to wave dismissively. Second stall from the door. "Don't worry about it, I'm already done jerking off."

The steam must have been getting to him, because for about half a second Harkness felt his processes try to lock up on him. Well. That was definitely another statement to put in the folder of weird things Ted had felt the need to tell him. "--Right."

Ted let out a bubbly kind of laugh. The kind that just burst out of him like he couldn't contain his amusement. "You're way too easy to throw for a loop, babe," he said teasingly. Harkness couldn't deny it. Ted always threw him for a loop. "So why the visit? You following me or something? Keeping tabs?"

"I--" There was another hitch in his thoughts, everything stuttering as he remembered why he'd gone looking for his human in the first place. That anger-- he didn't want to expose Ted to it. Didn't want to ruin that good mood. "It's nothing," Harkness said finally. "Just wondering how long it'd be before you're ready to go."

"You're a shitty liar, y'know that?" The water shut off abruptly and Ted stepped out without a single scrap of clothing on his person, white hair plastered to his scalp and forehead as opposed to looking like a... cotton ball? Something white and fluffy. Harkness was still working on the whole metaphor thing. Somehow being dripping wet and naked made him look even more scrawny.

Then he plucked a towel out of one of the lockers to dry his hair, and the resulting gravity-defying absurdity was even enough to make Harkness snort with a barely-stifled laugh. Ted blinked at the noise, and then he grinned and toweled his hair again to fluff it further. Harkness ducked his head and covered his mouth with his hand.

Shit. He couldn't be angry. He couldn't even stop himself from smiling. His human was defying the laws of physics just to make him laugh.

And when Ted slipped on the wet floor with his wet feet on his way to the sink - landing on his ass instead of his face, at least - Harkness had to fight the urge to laugh at that too. Because he had the fleeting insane notion that maybe gravity was getting back at Ted for pulling that stunt with his hair. Harkness knew that was impossible, of course. Gravity couldn't hold grudges. It was a force of nature.

But so was Ted, wasn't he? "Hey, Hark," the Vaultie said as he hauled himself up, wincing but still managing to smirk anyway. At least he didn't seem to be holding gravity accountable, but that was probably because he'd just thwart it again later like the troublemaker he was. "Want a shave while we've got the water for it?"

Harkness couldn't think of a reason to say no to that.

\---

Shaving to Harkness usually meant an annoying quarter of an hour spent with a straight razor as he valiantly attempted to cut the hair growing on his face without actually cutting his face. He wasn't sure how humans managed to do it so regularly, with their imprecise movements and inexact measurements. So it startled him a bit to find that Ted with his clever hands and electric razor intended to do the shaving instead.

Not that Harkness didn't trust the Vaultie, just... Just. Articulating a protest was hard when he didn't know why he was doing it. Because again, there was no reason to say no. His anxiety was baseless. There was no danger; the electric razor was safe enough, and Ted wouldn't hurt him.

That was how he ended up in front of a sink that Ted was perched on the edge of, pale legs wrapped loosely around Harkness's waist, warm breath and cool fingertips on his face accompanied by the low buzzing of the razor that gently grazed his skin. And as Ted worked, he mumbled things. About how Butchie would want to smack him for using an electric razor instead of a real one. About Harkness having a jawline that could cut glass. About anything that came to mind.

He kissed Harkness after he'd finished, lazy and unhurried. Harkness asked if there was less rugburn; Ted laughed like the question was the best joke he'd heard all day. Then he set the razor down in favor of going for the aftershave, applying it to Harkness's face with far more care than he seemed to use for himself. Harkness smiled faintly as the strong smell of it assaulted his senses, inhaling deeply and savoring it.

Something to distract him for the rest of the day. As if he lacked for sources of distraction. Lately it was rarer for him to _not_ have a portion of his background processes dedicated to something Ted had done or said or shown him.

"We have to leave eventually, y'know," Ted murmured.

Right. They did. Harkness was just reluctant to. He did have Ted in a near-ideal position for more kissing, after all. And he didn't know when they'd get the chance to do any of it again. Rivet City had some measure of privacy, but it was full of people. People who talked about everything. Maybe they could go to Megaton after the business with Ted's father was finished, but who could say how long that would take?

His hands gripped the sides of the sink a little tighter, and he fought back the temptation to say something irrational. Sentimental. Pointlessly obvious. Yet that was all that came to mind. All he could think to say. He didn't want to go. He didn't want these stolen moments to end. He wanted to hide away-- to stay with his malfunctioning human, to go on adventures with him.

When Harkness didn't respond for several seconds, Ted just sighed, shaking his head and gently pushing Harkness away with a hand on his chest. Hopping down from the edge of the sink, Ted walked over to the bench where he'd set down his things and began putting his clothes back on, underwear to jumpsuit to socks to boots to pip-boy. He looked... Sad. Dejected. It was the air he always gave whenever he tried to assume an expressionless mask. Like the lack of expression was sad in itself.

Maybe he was considering the same things Harkness was.

They left the shower room and headed down the hall together, Ted picking up the jacket and tying it around his waist on the way out. Harkness trailed behind by about five feet while his human marched on ahead, favoring playing with his pip-boy over paying attention to walking, yet still somehow managing to not trip over anything (including the robobrain pile-up). It was baffling how he could be so clumsy one moment and so self-assured not all that much later.

But more importantly, there was an alarmingly high statistical probability that if Ted were not present, Harkness would be inclined towards an altercation with the Vaultie's father the next time they met. He would rather avoid that; his human memories and personal experience told him that an altercation with Ted himself would be highly likely to follow. Much like James Hargrave would defend Tammy.

Harkness couldn't help but draw a mental comparison to how he would have defended Zimmer as A3-21, too. The comparison bothered him even more than the situation itself did.

He tried not to think about it when they caught up to Ted's father near the entrance to the vault. Tried not to consider that the duffle bag the man had picked up looked like Ted's old, patchy one from Megaton, with the missile launcher's distinctive shape suspiciously absent. Tried not to notice that the bits of combat armor that Ted's father had strapped on over the Vault 101 jumpsuit looked a hell of a lot like what Harkness had walked in with.

Pointless to dwell on it. Harkness had discarded those things on the way in, and lost track of them in the intervening time. It was only natural that the doctor had scavenged them. At least the bastard had armed himself with a hunting rifle so that Harkness wouldn't have to bother with defending him.

Davies suggested waiting till nightfall to leave, then going the rest of the way via the underground network of metro stations. Ted protested that it would take "for-fucking-ever". Davies told him to watch his language, and then brought up Ted's health. Ted insisted he was fine and that he had it handled. Davies said he wouldn't let Ted risk himself further. Ted said something about how his father should've thought of that before leaving the Vault in the first place.

"Harkness, please," Davies said, exasperated. "Make him see reason."

"What he's saying sounds reasonable to me," Harkness replied. Ted glanced back to smile briefly, conveying a sort of wordless gratitude; Harkness nodded once to acknowledge it.

Davies turned away from them both and shook his head with a long, tired sigh, rubbing at his eyes with one hand. "Fine," he conceded about forty-seven seconds of silence later. "Since the pair of you seem hellbent on being foolish about this, we can do it your way. If we leave now, we might reach Rivet City by nightfall."

Ted rolled his eyes and started towards the large Vault door, Harkness following him dutifully. "Fucking _finally_."

"Language, Theodore," Davies said. Harkness was starting to think it was some kind of habit.

But it was Ted. So of course the Vaultie's natural response - and one Harkness found to be refreshing, after the submissive stance his human had taken previously - was to flip his father off. Ted didn't even bother look back to see what kind of reaction it got. Even with familial ties, it seemed his patience for bullshit had limits. "Kiss my ass, old man."

Good. Maybe between the two of them, they could get Ted's father to be a bit less of an ass.

\---

"So, Harkness," Davies began, a couple of miles into their journey. The sky had turned to a dull overcast grey, _85a3ab_ in hexadecimal, and the barometric pressure had dropped. Ted had the radio playing on his pip-boy, the speakers turned up to the point where they were just shy of making the sound start to clip and pop. "I don't suppose you're equipped with the Three Laws of Robotics?"

Which left Harkness to do the talking when there was talking to be done. Not that there had been much of it. Harkness was fine with companionable silence and it had seemed like Davies felt a bit too awkward about breaking it up to that point. As far as Harkness was concerned, that wasn't a bad thing. "I don't even know what those are," he admitted.

"You don't?" The doctor sounded astonished. "Good God, I can't imagine what your creators were thinking."

Ted sighed. "Maybe they were thinking of making a slave that would have no qualms beating dissenters or political enemies to death." He didn't look up from his pip-boy as he spoke. It was a good thing nothing had decided to attack them beyond the occasional easily-dispatched mole rat.

"Rather morbid way of putting it," Davies remarked.

The pip-boy fell to Ted's side along with his arm. "Pull that 'just a robot' shit and we're gonna have a problem, old man."

His father huffed. "Now hold on, I didn't say that."

"You were thinking it," Ted shot back.

As much as Harkness appreciated Ted coming to his defense, he did have a question that this whole conversation had brought to mind. "What are the 'three laws of robotics'?" He looked to Ted questioningly. "Is this something I should know?"

Ted craned his neck to toss Harkness a smirk. "Remind me to find you some Asimov, Hark."

"Asimov?"

"Books. Mostly books about robots."

Ted's father seemed almost surprised. "Books-- on paper? Couldn't you simply find a digitised copy in some archive somewhere and download it to your memory banks?"

Harkness supposed he could, but it wouldn't be the same. Besides, hooking himself up to a terminal was... Unpleasant, generally. And he was understandably reluctant to turn his wireless networking capability back on. He wasn't about to say all that out loud, though. "I prefer books," he said instead. "You didn't answer my question."

"Well, I don't remember the Three Laws _exactly_. Theodore's the one who was always going on about those sorts of stories."

Ted snorted. "Oh, gee thanks. Make me do all the work, why don'tcha." He went back to his pip-boy, fiddling with the buttons for a moment and turning off the radio just as that Three-Dog guy was coming on. "Just to clarify, I don't agree with the Three Laws and I think the intent behind them is pretty telling, and honestly I think the guy who came up with them agrees with me, so..."

"They seem perfectly reasonable to me," Davies said. Ted didn't dignify the statement with a direct response.

"The Three Laws of Robotics go like so," the Vaultie said. "One: A robot may not harm a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. Two: A robot must obey orders given to it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. Three: A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law."

"Now why is it that you remember _that_ , and yet you never seem to remember your classwork?" his father mused.

"A murder mystery about robots doesn't make me feel like a part of my soul is dying," Ted answered.

Harkness decided he would very much like to read a murder mystery about robots. "What happens if a-- are androids considered robots in this setting?"

"Yeah, it's a blanket term that includes any kind of machine with what's known as a positronic brain," Ted explained. "So, anything with a decently complicated AI is a robot."

"I don't have a positronic brain."

"Right, you've got something like a solid-state drive rattling around up there. But you do have a complex AI and oodles of memory."

"What's an oodle?"

"It's a word, don't worry about it." Ted ignored that his father had made a sound like a stifled, snorting chuckle that had half-escaped through his nose.

Right. "What happens if a robot goes against the Three Laws?"

"They can't," Ted told him. "Not willfully. It's built into the standard OS. Even thinking about breaking the First Law can start to cause errors and latency problems. Witnessing a human coming to harm or die even in an unavoidable way can still throw one off badly enough for it to shut down. More complex ones are a little better at handling it, but it'll still lock them up even in a situation that makes it clear that the greater good is more important than one dude not getting a little bit bruised."

That didn't seem practical. Nor did Ted seem wrong about the implications of them. "Sounds like built-in subservience to me," Harkness said.

Ted threw his hands up in an emphatic gesture. "I _know,_ right?"

Behind them, Davies let out another long-suffering sigh.

 


	16. 14: walt

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Crazy tactics seem to be contagious.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> THIS. TOOK. FOREVER.
> 
> First I went on vacation because a frand was here, then I was just. So exhausted from that. And after that the chapter fought me at every turn. On top of that, the hype for FO4 is both very real and _very distracting_. Every day there's something new, it seems.
> 
> So, have a chapter. And then after this, have another chapter on me. DOUBLE UPLOAD WHOO.

Another mile without stopping or slowing down, and Ted's strength was visibly waning. "Are you quite alright, son?" his father asked.

Ted bit out a retort of "fuck you, I'm fine" and that was the extent of the conversation. From there the doctor took the lead, and Harkness matched Ted's pace to walk at his side with quiet concern. It didn't matter that he waved Harkness off, because he wasn't going to be _fine_ for long at such a pace and anyone who knew him would be able to see that. His father should be able to see that, certainly. For being so concerned with his son's health, Davies definitely wasn't allowing for it.

But Harkness knew his human, so it was Ted he lowered his voice to speak to. "How long do you think you can hold out for?" he asked.

Ted huffed a laugh between shallow breaths, shaking his head and smiling thinly. "We're too close to Andale," he said, "and my VATS is pinging on an eyebot down the road. Like hell I'm stopping now."

Which meant he knew he had to rest soon. Harkness nodded gravely as he processed that information, mentally calculating where there might be a safe place to do so nearby. The city wasn't far off if they continued following the road, with plenty of defensible locations among the rubble. It would delay their arrival in Rivet City, but the delay would be far worse if Ted were to continue beyond his limits.

Harkness had no desire to see Ted falter, but saying so would be a pointless blow to his human's pride.

So instead, he gave voice to what he was thinking underneath it all. "I don't like your father," he muttered, flicking a glance in the man's direction.

It was telling that Ted didn't smile. "I know, babe." Cool fingers brushed the back of Harkness's hand. "You don't have to."

Good. Then he wouldn't waste energy trying to force himself to do so. "Is it alright if I punch him?" Harkness asked then. The urge had struck him a few times.

Ted snickered. It sounded a bit wheezy. "If it's just a little, I'm okay with that. No killing or maiming though." It took him a second to catch Harkness's incredulous stare. "--Hey, I trust you, right? If you think there's good reasons to punch somebody, then there probably are. Doesn't matter who it is." His mirth had a sort of edge to it. "Besides, maybe I wanna do it myself sometimes."

That was fair. "What's stopping you?"

"Mostly the fact that he's got a point," Ted grumbled. "Sorta. Sometimes."

Ted's father must have heard them. "What are you boys mumbling about back there?" he called out.

"Nothing!" Ted answered quickly. "Just mentioning that the enclave radio eyebots ruined a perfectly good song for me."

"Which, the _Battle Hymn of the Republic_?" James Davies didn't look back as he was speaking, keeping his eyes on the road ahead. Harkness realized that, yes, that was indeed the tune that the eyebot in the distance was playing. "You do know that was propaganda to begin with, yes?"

"Fuck, I don't care." It seemed that being tired made Ted irritable. "Still a good song. Y'know, musically."

"Your taste in music isn't exactly standard for a nineteen year old, you know. Also, must you be crude?"

"If you're gonna tease me about _Les Mis_ again I swear I'll go through the whole goddamn soundtrack. Seriously, try me."

Even Harkness had to give Ted a strange look for that. It seemed there were still things he didn't know about his human after all. "You'd collapse," he noted.

Ted grinned up at him. "Heh. You know _Les Miserables_?" The Vaultie's French pronunciation was mangled almost beyond comprehension. Harkness allowed himself some small amusement when his system tried to translate it anyway and the attempt was equally garbled.

It was a good thing his human memories picked up his system's slack. Human memories of musical theater classes taken as electives for the sake of impressing women, but informative memories nonetheless. "Yes."

"Could you do bass if I did tenor?"

"Probably," Harkness answered, only half-truthful. He was definitely capable of achieving the correct pitch, and it wouldn't be hard to dig through his implanted memories to determine what the correct pitch was. There was a sense of shame that he got from the memories associated with such music, though the knowledge was indeed there. But the shame wasn't what stopped him. "I'd rather not, though."

His human pouted, but the look was playful all the same. "Aaawww, you're no fun."

That was fine. Harkness was all right with being no fun if it meant he could avoid embarrassing himself by showing how inhuman he was. He could be pitch-perfect. Too pitch-perfect, in fact. Speech was easy enough to modulate, with programs specifically designed for making it sound authentic. But music? Music was meant to be performed in as close an approximation to how it was written as possible. He couldn't bring himself to be off-key. It bothered him to try.

Ted might understand that, but his father--

"Thank you for not encouraging him, Harkness," the doctor said. Once again, Harkness had to fight back against the urge to hit the man. Hard not to be tempted when Davies seemed determined to miss the point of Harkness's actions at every opportunity.

He focused instead on the strong smell of aftershave, and slim fingers that covertly wound together with his own.

\---

Raiders.

Neither Ted nor Harkness had found raiders to be a particularly difficult obstacle up to that point. Chems and crazy were no match for cleverness, perfect aim, explosives, or the contents of the raiders' own makeshift petting zoo.

So it wasn't the fact that they'd come up against raiders not even a hundred meters off from civilization that had Harkness grabbing both humans by their jumpsuits and dragging them behind a half-crumbled building. It was the fact that the raiders had a missile launcher, and their idea of a warning shot had come dangerously close to actually hitting them as it whizzed past.

"Jesus christ on a fucking pancake," the Vaultie swore. He looked more ridiculous than usual with the collar of his jumpsuit all lopsided and hiked up to somewhere around his ears. "The fuck did they get one of those at?"

"Where'd you get yours?" Harkness countered as he did a few mental calculations. The missile launcher would take about ten seconds to reload between shots, but the raiders probably had assault rifles.

Ted shrugged lightly. "Super mutants." He already had his laser pistol out. Not that he got a chance to fire it; the minute he poked his head out, he had to jerk back as their position was peppered with bullets. "Shit, won't get the chance to use VATS like that." Yep. They had assault rifles.

"Did you not think to bring your glasses when you left the Vault?" Davies asked his son, sounding exasperated.

"I was kinda in a hurry. They weren't a priority."

"You can't always rely on VATS to do the aiming for you, you know--"

Harkness grabbed them both by the collars and forced them down again just in time to avoid another missile impact; the battered structure around them shook dangerously as a plume of concrete dust washed over them.

Both humans came up coughing, but Ted was first to recover. "Cars," he rasped, choking on dust. "Four shots, s'all I need--"

"No time," Harkness said. Ted needed more than the average amount of time to aim. It was possible that Harkness - or even Ted's father, with his own gun - could pierce one of the cars' fuel tanks with the magnum, but to ignite the tanks for sure it would have to be the laser pistol. Which only Ted would be able to efficiently shoot with in the time allotted.

"We can't just sit around," the doctor wheezed.

Harkness nodded grimly and went to stand.

"Harkness, what the fuck--"

"I'll draw their fire," Harkness told them, looking at Ted pointedly. "We'll have once chance. Don't miss."

"Oh, so that's your plan? Bullet sponge it up while I do th-- damn it, robot! Get back here!"

Too late. Harkness was already on the move, and a missile was quick to follow as it soared past where he'd been when he'd first stood. Perfect. Because that was exactly what his plan was. He'd calculated the risks in his head, and there was far less likelihood of him getting hit if he kept moving than if they all stayed behind cover and waited for the missile launcher and assault rifle fire to wear them down.

"Shit..." he heard Ted mutter, followed closely by the distinct sound of energy weapons fire amidst all the bullets. He didn't look back. Didn't have to. He heard the initial minor explosion of an aging gas tank igniting just as he was ducking behind a dilapidated bus stop on the other side of the street. Mostly unscathed. As predicted.

It was a good thing he'd had a competent teacher in the art of crazy tactical decisions.

\---

After that, the action died down.

There was more arguing, of course. After a half-dozen cars had blown up in a massive chain reaction that shook the ground beneath their feet and blew the raiders to hell, Ted's father changed his mind about wanting to go that way.

"It's irradiated now," he said with a disapproving frown.

Ted sighed. He sounded as tired as he looked. "Alpha particles, dad. Give it a minute, they'll go away." Nothing was said about how giving it a minute would also give him a moment to rest. Harkness suspected that his human preferred it that way.

"Alpha particles are far more potentially damaging--"

"--when the isotopes are ingested," the Vaultie said, easing himself down to sit on a bit of overturned pavement. "Barely dangerous at all otherwise. I'd go through now if it weren't for Harkness."

That surprised Harkness enough for him to do a double-take. "Because I'm here?"

"Even weak radiation penetrates electronics. Disrupts signals. Y'know," and there, Ted paused to gesture vaguely, "the kind of thing that made RobCo manufacture such clunky robots. Easier to make 'em lead-lined that way. Now c'mere, you're bleeding."

Harkness didn't argue with that. It wasn't bad enough to need repairs - not like his arm probably still would - but a few bullets had managed to graze him. It stung, though not enough for him to think it was worth mentioning. But Ted seemed to find some kind of strange comfort in taking care of him, so he was willing to let his human indulge in that much.

Thankfully, the laser pistol wasn't involved. Just the old ripped up bits of shirt Ted had kept.

Both of them ignored how Ted's father seemed disgusted by the whole affair, huffing and wandering off to moodily pick through the rubble as he waited for them to finish. Harkness figured it was because of the dirty rags being used as bandages. Maybe he didn't know that Harkness couldn't get infections? Or perhaps it was just the principle of the thing. The man was supposed to be a doctor, after all, and all the medical professionals Harkness had known were the kinds of people who cleaned their instruments with a kind of dedication usually reserved for religious rituals.

That was a good point, actually. Did Ted have any religious rituals? A lot of the humans in Rivet City seemed to, but Harkness hadn't recorded any instances of Ted showing interest in that sort of thing. If anything, he blasphemed with remarkable frequency; the amount of profanity Ted regularly spouted had no precedent in Harkness's memory when considered in tandem with his malfunctioning human's intellect.

He came out of his thoughts more convinced of his small human's uniqueness than he'd ever been, as well as being certain that he would never run out of questions.

"Alright, we're good to go," Ted declared more loudly than necessary, probably for his father's benefit. Though the part where his hand lingered on Harkness's knee for a moment was somewhat more nebulous in its intent. To Harkness, anyway. Was it meant to be a simulacra of the things they'd done earlier? A reminder? A promise of more? Or merely a gesture of comfort, for either or both of them; something like the similar touches to his shoulder, his arm?

Well, they'd be back in Rivet City soon enough. Maybe then he could get some answers to fill in the cognitive gaps. And possibly find time for more kissing.

 


	17. 15: who will save

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Definition not found for "boyfriend".

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> DOUBLE UPLOADS ALL THE WAY ACROSS THE SKY.
> 
> Don't ask. I'm a nerd, aight. I'll get titles done in a minute.

Nothing else decided to mess with them between the outskirts of DC and Rivet City. Nothing that a single magnum round to the head couldn't take care of, at any rate. Harkness was thankful for that, mainly because he was running a little low on ammo.

On approach, he noticed that the drawbridge was out. Sloppy. Hopefully Lana was still paying attention to everyone who went in or out.

"Alright, old man," Ted said as they approached the pier, spinning on his heel to do the speaking-while-walking-backwards thing that always bugged the hell out of Harkness, "I think you can find your way to Doc Li from here, right?"

James Davies paused mid-step to peer at his son. "You're not going to join us?"

"Got shit to do. I'll be down later when you need me." The Vaultie stopped just short of the pier, leaning against one of the steel girders holding it up; Harkness moved to stand a few feet away, feeling inexplicably protective.

The doctor's gaze flicked to Harkness and turned suspicious. "Right then. And you, Harkness? You're staying behind also?"

Well, if Ted was staying, then Harkness would rather be where his human was. "Yes."

"I see," Davies said in such a way as to imply disapproval. Why did he disapprove? Because his son wasn't doing what he wanted? Harkness had to wonder at how much the man actually paid attention, because Ted rarely did what any authority figure wanted him to do. "Well then. I suppose I'll see you in a bit, yes?"

Ted shrugged. "Probably."

"At least--" The doctor cut himself off, shooting a glance at Harkness. "Just. Give some thought to what I've said, all right?"

At that, the muscles in Ted's jaw tightened. "Maybe. Are you gonna go or what?"

And eventually, Davies did just that. It was hard for Harkness to say to say what kind of look Ted's father gave them both before he left. Pained? Disappointed? Whatever it was, something about it made Ted flinch. Like he'd been struck a physical blow, almost. It wasn't until the man was well out of earshot halfway across the bridge that Ted relaxed, sagging against the corroded steel with a heavy sigh. All the defiant energy had been drained away, stubborn resentment giving way to exhaustion.

He looked defeated. In a way, maybe he had been.

Harkness wordlessly took the opportunity to step closer and take the Vaultie's hands, simply holding them; he didn't dare apply pressure for fear of snapping those slender fingers, worried that even a gentle squeeze meant to reassure would be too much. The pressure sensitivity in his right hand especially was still a bit off.

But Ted seemed to understand, and the tiny smile he gave in response calmed some of Harkness's anxieties. "Hey," Ted mumbled. He sounded as worn down as he looked. "Still with me, huh?"

Always with the obvious questions. Yet the answers consistently proved to be more complicated than Harkness could articulate reliably. Because the honest answer was that he _wanted_ to stay - had so many reasons for wanting such a thing that he wasn't sure how long it would take to list them - and he knew Ted well enough to understand that simply saying as much without giving his reasons wouldn't be enough to convince the Vaultie it was true. Because Ted didn't seem to think of himself as worth being wanted.

Harkness had no idea if he'd ever be able to effectively counter that. He couldn't calculate the statistics of people getting better, because none of the data he'd gathered had established a precedent for it. It was entirely possible he'd never be able to go beyond simply preventing things from getting worse, and even that wasn't a sure thing.

Still, he had to try. No one else seemed to even want to bother, even the kid's own father. And Ted was worth the effort. Any effort. Harkness was sure of that much.

"You're doing the quiet thing again, babe," his human said, teasing.

"Sorry," Harkness responded. Then he added, "I'm not leaving yet. Not unless you want me to." Because... Ted needed to hear that, right? Wasn't that why he asked?

Well, Ted laughed when he heard it, so that counted for something. "Don't apologize, you're being you. And uh," there the Vaultie paused, averting his eyes for a moment, "I was gonna suggest heading over to Pinkerton to get your arm checked out, if you're okay with that."

Yes. Harkness was okay with that.

\---

Most people in Rivet City didn't bother with the broken bow of the ship. To get there, one either had to cross the rickety makeshift bridge over the water and get through the locked door on the other side, or take a swim in the filthy, irradiated river. Ted, who was the sort to make a visit to Preston for some RadAway after even a short dip in the water, chose the rickety bridge option.

Then he picked the lock, because he was also the sort of person to view locked doors as a challenge.

"You had bobby pins on you?" Harkness asked as the heavy door swung open.

"Always do," his human replied, bending to disarm a tripwire just inside the door like he knew it would be there. Harkness followed the wire to its source: a rigged shotgun set up on a shelf inside. He had to wonder if such things were why the humans who had guided him to Pinkerton to begin with had advised him to knock first. "Pockets, babe. They're useful."

A few meters further and Ted was bending again to disarm a frag mine tucked under a table. From where he stored the frag mine after he picked it up, Harkness could only assume that the inside of the jumpsuit also contained pockets. Either that, or the baggy jumpsuit was considered by Ted to be a very large pocket itself.

When they got to Pinkerton's lab, it seemed empty. Both the supercomputer and the terminal were still on, but the doctor himself wasn't in view. Screens still concealed the area where the surgical equipment was, and the same filing cabinet was still laying sideways on the floor.

Not much had changed from when Harkness had last been there. Back then, he'd come to Pinkerton knowing full well that he might never be A3-21 again. Had Pinkerton known then that complete erasure wouldn't be enough to protect him? Was that why the failsafe had been implemented, in spite of what he'd asked for?

"Hey, Pinky!" Ted shouted, effectively pulling Harkness out of his introspection. "Get your ass down here, you got company!"

Past the second array of computers upstairs, there was an undignified squawk followed by a loud _whump_. Then some muffled cursing was accompanied by shuffling and hurried footsteps before Doctor Pinkerton came to view at the top of the stairs. He looked disheveled, moreso than when Harkness had last seen him; his state of disarray made him seem even older somehow.

"The hell do you want?" the Pinkerton snapped, squinting at them both.

Ted jabbed his thumb towards Harkness, grinning. "I brought a friend."

Pinkerton eyed Harkness suspiciously for several seconds. "So it's _that_ one, eh?" the old man drawled, turning his attention back to Ted. "I suppose that means you tripped the failsafe."

"That's right."

The doctor sighed, but he appeared exasperated rather than angry or disappointed. He started down the stairs carefully, one hand on the railing the whole time. Harkness realized as he observed the man that Pinkerton was barely a couple of inches taller than Ted was.

"So," the old man said as he reached the bottom, squinting again as he cocked his head to peer at Harkness. "What seems to be the trouble, android?"

\---

Harkness had never enjoyed having repairs done.

First, he'd be hooked up to a computer. Then the human using the computer would... Access him. Look at his code, find the faults, figure out how extensive the damage was according to his system. Physical evidence wasn't enough; his code had to be accessed to find out where and how electronics might have been affected as well. As Ted had correctly stated, it wasn't like rewiring a lamp at all.

After that, the human doing the repairs would shut off all connections and feedback from the affected area and begin their work. If it was bad enough he'd be shut down completely, but in the case of limb damage his input was necessary when it came to ensuring that all the damage had been fixed and everything was once again in full working order. One human had compared it to anesthesia, but Harkness was fairly sure that even an anesthetized limb could still be felt to some degree, merely going numb.

Fairly sure. Not completely sure. He could be wrong. After all, he wasn't human.

Pinkerton led him over to the terminal behind the screens, already pulling out and uncoiling a cable from underneath the operating table to make the connection with. Without a word Harkness moved to sit on the same operating table, and Ted hopped up onto it at his left while he unzipped his jumpsuit down to his waist and freed both his arms from it.

"So how're we gonna do this?" Ted asked, kicking his feet back and forth.

"Well, first we're gonna plug your boyfriend here into this computer. Then we'll see what the computer has to tell us about what's wrong, and _then_ \--" Pinkerton paused briefly as he put one end of his cable into its proper port on the terminal, "--we'll fix him right up."

Ted stopped kicking his feet in favor of craning his neck to lift an eyebrow at the doctor from around Harkness. "I meant technical details, Pinky."

"Good for you." It was clear that Pinkerton wasn't interested in giving those technical details. Trade secrets?

Then Harkness stilled - stiffened, even - as rough-textured hands brushed the back of his neck, followed by the cold press of metal against the port hidden under his skin. He tensed further at the sharp pain of it as he was hooked up to the terminal, although it was thankfully fleeting. His system accepted the connection with little more than a blip at its presence, merely noting that it was there for the time being.

A small hand wound itself with his own, squeezing gently. "Hey, you okay?"

Harkness forced himself to relax, letting out a slow, quiet breath. "Needs to be done," he said.

"I'll say," Pinkerton agreed readily, going back to his terminal. Booting it up. Harkness could-- could _feel_ that there was a connection there, available to be accessed. Not that he could. He didn't have authorization. "You should at least come in for regular diagnostics, A3-21. Now that you know what you are, anyway. Regular doctors might get suspicious."

"Haven't needed to." Didn't want to, either. Besides, he could do his own diagnostic and maintenance routines, and surface injuries were quick to heal. If he didn't have to come in, then he wasn't going to.

The next part was the bit that Harkness absolutely hated. It was hard to describe what it was like to have his system accessed. Knowing it was necessary never made it feel less like a violation as what safeguards he had simply gave way to the absolute authority that a human user at a terminal had over him. He was never more aware of being little more than lines of code - a program running on a machine - than when those very lines of code were being exposed, pulled apart, and observed.

There was no relaxing while in the clutches of-- of _that_. He was afraid to move, or breathe, or even think. Because he was never sure how much of his random access memory and temporary files could be seen when he was accessed. Did his thoughts manifest as lines of code on the screen, or did they form words? He didn't know - couldn't know - because his system processed all of that for him and filtered it into what he considered to be his awareness. He wasn't fully aware of the process itself, only the result.

That lack of knowledge made him scared as hell.

At his left, he heard an annoyed growl; the hand holding his own tightened its grip, forcing him to be aware of it. Tying him to reality. "Do you have to hack into him like that?" Ted asked, audibly dismayed. "Can't he give you access instead?"

"Doesn't have it," Pinkerton replied distractedly, tapping away at the keys to his terminal. "I need admin privileges."

"He doesn't have admin privileges for his own system?" Ted sounded-- confused? Horrified? Harkness opened his eyes and turned his head to peer at his human in disbelief. Of course he didn't have that kind of control. He wasn't meant to. Only a few of his processes had anything more than read-only access, and they were maintenance routines.

Pinkerton only snorted. "Giving him admin access would be kinda like giving a human the ability to perform brain surgery on himself, kid. Not the brightest idea."

"Pinky, I like you, but right now I think you're full of shit," the Vaultie grumbled. "Can't you at least do it, y'know, wirelessly?"

That thought scared Harkness even more. Wirelessly? So that anyone might be able to access him? At any time? That had been the first thing he'd had disabled. In the Commonwealth it had practically been a neon sign over his head proclaiming he was a synth-- he'd had to get rid of it because he knew, _knew_ from experience that it was one of the first things the Synth Retention Bureau would use to track runners--

"I'd rather not," he said, thankful that his voice was steady. "Connect wirelessly, that is."

Ted sighed, leaning into his shoulder; he was grateful for that, too. A human who listened instead of forcing things. "Yeah, okay," Ted relented. "I guess that wouldn't fix that it's still hacking, huh?"

"No," Harkness said. "It wouldn't."

It took a moment for him to realize then that the typing had stopped. When he turned to look, he saw that Pinkerton was giving the pair of them a nonplussed look. "Just how close to the mark was I when I made the boyfriend joke?" the old man asked.

It was somewhat telling that Ted's response was to dissolve into snorting giggles.

 


	18. 16: on the earth

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> How does one ask for things they don't know they want?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This... did not end how I wanted it to. It was supposed to end with plot. But they wanted to cuddle, so I let them cuddle. Stubborn, stubborn muses.
> 
> Look at these cute bastards. LOOKIT. A whole chapter of fluff and PDA.

The actual repair didn't take long; it was simple enough, and the damage hadn't been extensive (although Pinkerton hadn't approved of Ted's slapdash attempt to do it himself). Full functionality had been restored to Harkness's right hand, leaving only the scars on his arm. Still, they'd arrived at Rivet City late enough in the day that it was getting dark by the time they got outside again, the air having a cloying thickness to it due to rising humidity. Above, the sky had gone from innocuous overcast to a darker, more menacing greenish-grey, and the barometric pressure had dropped again.

Harkness had little interest in the weather, however. On the way out of the ship's bow, Ted stole a few of Pinkerton's cables and a few rolls of spare wiring. He wasn't subtle about it; Harkness was fairly sure that Pinkerton had seen the Vaultie going for his things, and just didn't care. The jumpsuit was beginning to look lumpy and awkward from the junk that Ted had stuffed into it.

"You could have just asked," Harkness admonished.

"Nah, then he would've had to argue with me about it to keep up appearances." The Vaultie winced as he suppressed a sneeze, rubbing at his nose afterward. "Fucking allergies."

Allergies weren't something that Harkness could do much about, so he decided not to comment. "So you decided that acting like a petty criminal was the preferred option?" he asked, frowning as they headed back along the unsteady bridge that led to the shore.

Ted's barely-stifled snickering gave the impression that he didn't take the conversation seriously. "Babe, I _am_ a petty criminal."

Yes. Well. Most of the time Harkness could ignore that. "I could still have you thrown overboard," he noted. "Again."

"But you won't," Ted countered, "because you think I'm cute."

"I don't think you're cute. I think you're underweight. I also think you're a nuisance."

"A fucking adorable nuisance."

"A confusing, impossible nuisance." This was an argument, wasn't it? So why didn't it feel like one? Why was Harkness having to fight the urge to smile? "Who uses too much aftershave, instigates too many fights, and has an unhealthy fondness for explosives. How are you not deaf?"

It was irrational. They were irrational. And Harkness wasn't the only one smiling. "Your hearing's still perfect," the Vaultie pointed out.

That-- that only applied if Harkness stayed at his side, didn't it? Was Ted implying that he wanted that? That he'd prefer it if Harkness left Rivet City behind completely? It had to be obvious just how irresponsible it would be for Harkness to do that; Ted had to know how ridiculous such a suggestion might sound. How little sense it made for him to be away from Rivet City on a semi-permanent basis - away from the safety of its walls - just for the sake of adventuring.

Yet much like their mutual affection, subjectively it made all the sense in the world. So maybe it was conventional logic as a whole that was wrong.

"Is that why you stole those cables?" Harkness asked.

And Ted grinned, his posture relaxing somewhat at the question. Once again, Harkness was relieved to see that he'd said the right thing. "Something like that," Ted answered. "Still trying to work it out in my head, but I'll let you know when I've got a plan."

"A plan for what?"

"Making sure you're independent."

Harkness stopped in his tracks, his processes lagging for a fraction of a second.

Independent. Like freedom, but with a less nebulous meaning that was harder for people - humans - to twist. Freedom could be redefined to have limitations. Independence was clearer in its intent, carrying a certain acknowledgment of the responsibilities and burdens that came with it. Which put it a good deal closer to what Harkness had wanted from the start: to cut all ties to the Institute, no matter how much it cost him. To no longer allow any human to have power over him.

There was no doubt in his mind that Ted was fully aware of that; he was sure the wording had been deliberate. But that didn't make it any less startling to hear it coming from a human - any human - that his independence was a thing they supported, as opposed to his freedom. That they wanted him to be able to take care of himself, be his own person, live on his own terms. If anything it was especially surprising to hear it coming from Ted of all people, who had done so much for him already. Who had admitted to-- to _wanting_ him. Who had every reason to be selfish, to want to keep him.

Which could only mean that Ted was all right with the possibility of Harkness leaving. That Ted was fine with being alone, with happiness being less of a priority than Harkness being free. Even if it meant being free of Ted as well.

Thus in that fraction of a second, Harkness was struck with a sudden thought: therein lay the key to everything. Ted considered him an equal, and wanted that equality to be fully realized. As if nothing were valid unless it was a conscious choice on both their parts, made without pressure or coercion. Harkness being truly independent - being his own admin, as Ted had suggested - would give that choice the weight and validity needed for there to be certainty. It would strip away ulterior motives and leave only honesty behind.

In the moments that followed, Ted seemed to register that something was amiss, turning around to blink at Harkness as he reached the shore. "You okay?"

He was concerned. Like always. Harkness let out a faint huff of a laugh, closing the distance in a few long strides and catching his human's left hand in his own newly repaired one. His grip was a fraction of a percentage of his full strength, all he dared to exert. "I'm fine," he said. "Let's go."

No one in Rivet City proper said a word about how the two of them were still holding hands when they got there.

\---

He hadn't expected Ted to join him for dinner. But he wasn't exactly surprised, either.

They got to the Weatherly lobby and Ted detatched himself from Harkness to make a beeline for the counter, asking Vera for "the usual room, please" before darting back out without another word. Harkness didn't realize he was staring at the space where his human used to be until Vera snickered at him from behind her front desk, covering her mouth with a dainty hand.

"You two are adorable," she said.

Harkness leveled a frown at her. "You must have a weird definition of 'adorable'."

"Oh, I don't know. Big stoic security chief meets a scruffy troublemaker? Sounds like storybook material if you ask me."

"I didn't ask you," he said, feeling defensive; Vera just chuckled.

Though it did make him wonder if Ted had any books about androids in law enforcement. A murder mystery with robots had been mentioned, but Harkness didn't know any specifics. Still, robots. If it had robots, Harkness wanted to read it.

Well. So long as those robots weren't trying to end the world or something. He got the impression that such tales were common, along with stories of science and knowledge taken too far. After all, humans that wanted to understand seemed to be a much rarer breed than humans who assumed that being different was synonymous with being monstrous.

Sighing, he sat down at his usual place and leaned back in his chair to wait for the usual food to be brought out. Maintaining appearances was a nuisance, especially after not having needed to do so for a few days. It gave him a sort of quiet discomfort, a low-level alert that he couldn't quite define or determine the source of as if he were running a number of extra processes dedicated solely to keeping up this mask of humanity.

Had it always been that way, a deep-seated anxiety causing subtly heightened threat levels that he'd simply never noticed? Or was it a direct result of the stark contrast between his various interactions with individual humans, a construct that only existed in his mind and would not have become a problem had he not thought about it?

Such grim thoughts quickly dispersed when Ted popped back into the room, his jumpsuit looking significantly less lumpy than it had minutes before. "Man, I'm starving," he declared, promptly seating himself next to Harkness. Close enough that Harkness could feel the warmth radiating off of him. "What's for dinner?"

Vera, still at her desk, got a coy little smirk as she watched. She set one elbow on the desk and leaned her chin into her hand, observing the both of them. Harkness felt vaguely exposed. "Mirelurk cakes and sliced mutfruit. Buckingham's handling the cooking." She cocked her head to the side. "Shall I have him whip up another portion?"

"That'd be fucking amazing, thanks. How much do I owe you?"

Her smirk widened. "Oh, it's on the house for you, Teddy," she purred.

Ted let out a triumphant laugh and clapped his hands together. The action bumped his elbow into Harkness's side. "Vera, you're an angel."

"Aw, such a sweetie." Giggling faintly, Vera pushed herself away from the desk and rose up out of her chair with a habitual dress-smoothing motion. "Let me go get you a drink and make sure Buckingham knows your order."

"Take your time, sweetheart," Ted told her, scooting in a few inches closer to Harkness to the point of being pressed against his side. This action did not escape Vera's attention, judging by her knowing smile as she left the room.

Meanwhile, Harkness had to check his internal temperature to be sure that he wasn't overheating as Ted's knee bumped his leg under the table. It was so... Public. So blatant and unmistakable. And Harkness was startled to find that he didn't mind it a bit.

They stayed that close through dinner, with Ted eagerly telling an amused Vera about chaos theory and particle physics all while nicking sliced mutfruit from Harkness's plate with his usual complete lack of subtlety. Harkness was content to watch, relieved that the pressure to socialize had been alleviated by his human's enthusiastic diversion. The only unnecessary thing he had to do was eat, and even then he didn't have to do as much of it.

He wondered how much of it was intentional on Ted's part. And later, after Ted had dozed off with his head resting against Harkness's shoulder, he was finally able to admit to himself that his human was... Kind of adorable.

Still a nuisance, though.

\---

Ted had his room, and Harkness had his bunk. Logically, they should have returned to their respective places. But that necessitated Harkness actually wanting to leave for the bridge tower, and he didn't.

Also, Ted invited him in. It would be rude to refuse.

The room was large, surprisingly well-ventilated, and nicely furnished. It had a desk, a wardrobe, a queen-sized bed, a footlocker, a bedside table, and a suitcase. It didn't compare to Ted's house, but it was quite a bit nicer than the fold-up cot and footlocker that Harkness was used to.

"Close the door?" the Vaultie suggested as he plopped down on the bed, peeling off his boots and socks.

Harkness did as asked, and Ted nodded and murmured his thanks before walking to the wardrobe to pull out an undershirt with one sock still on. The incongruity of it was so very _Ted_ that Harkness had to smile. Next to come off was the pip-boy, followed by the jacket tied around his waist, the Vault suit, and the other sock. Then the fresh undershirt was pulled on, cleaner than the one Ted had been wearing previously by far.

Then with the shirt halfway over his head, Ted let out a snort of laughter. "Kinda weird when you just stare impassively like that," he remarked as he popped his head free of the fabric.

Blinking, Harkness quickly averted his eyes. "Sorry." Right. Needed to stop doing that.

"Don't be," came the standard response. Covers were flung aside as Ted practically threw himself onto the mattress. "Mmm, pillowtop... So are you coming or what?"

What? Harkness wasn't sure how to answer. "I don't...?" He didn't sleep. Didn't Ted know that?

Ted sighed and rolled over onto his back, propping himself up on his elbows to give Harkness a bland look. "You make a good space heater and my feet get cold. C'mere."

Was he expecting Harkness to-- actually, Harkness wasn't sure what was expected of him. Feeling distinctly nervous, Harkness approached the bed hesitantly and sat down on the edge of it, moving to take off his own boots.

"There, see?" The bed shifted as Ted fell back against it; when the boots were almost gone, Harkness felt him tug at the commandeered jumpsuit as well. "This too," he said, and Harkness reluctantly obeyed.

Thankfully, Ted didn't seem inclined to ask him to take off the undergarments as well. When his human finally seemed satisfied with his state of undress, Harkness glanced back with an eyebrow raised questioningly in a wordless request for further instruction. Ted just smirked and patted the bed, which Harkness interpreted as _lay down_. So he did.

And then there was a small, warm human nuzzling his way underneath Harkness's arm. Head on his chest like it was a pillow, a hand coming to rest over his ribs. " _Now_ you're getting it," the Vaultie said, barely muffling a yawn.

Harkness had to double-check his internal temperature when he realized that the intent was to-- to stay like that. All night. Just... Cuddled up to each other. Not that he minded. He definitely didn't have any complaints about such an arrangement. But it was-- it was so. Intimate.

Was such behavior standard procedure for humans who felt affection for one another? His human memories implied a reluctance, a distaste. Yet he felt none of that. Only a peculiar nervousness. Ted was small, and fragile, and felt smaller and more fragile still curled up against Harkness as he was. It brought to mind how easy it would be to break him without meaning to, and even though Harkness would do everything he could to avoid such a thing he couldn't quite rule out the possibility--

Shit. This was rapidly becoming complicated.

"You're all stiff, babe," Ted murmured. Thin fingers trailed lazily over metal ribs and synthetic muscle. "Somethin' wrong?"

Harkness sighed. Communication. Right. That thing he needed to work on. "I-- I'm not sure what I'm expected to do," he admitted. He could feel the warmth of Ted's breath through his shirt when the Vaultie chuckled.

"Pull up the covers, relax, n'fuckin' snuggle with me," Ted told him, tired but amused.

So... That was all? Again, not that Harkness was complaining, but it hardly fit what seemed to be standard procedure for... Sharing a bed. His own human side would probably have grumbled about such an arrangement (and given Harkness yet more reasons to believe that his namesake was a clod), and it amazed him that Ted was so open to it.

Careful to not jostle his human, Harkness did just as he'd been instructed; he tugged the covers up over them both, let himself relax somewhat, and... Snuggled. Rolled onto his side to gather Ted into his arms, pressed his face into soft colorless hair, closed his eyes and allowed himself to simply _feel_. And Ted must have been fine with that, too, because there was no hesitance in how he nestled himself against Harkness's chest. No reluctance in the soft, contented sigh that followed.

Ted fell asleep soon afterward, and with that Harkness saw no adequate reason to move from his spot before morning.

 


	19. intermission: butterfly in the still

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Awww, what a big ol' softie.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the boys are still delaying but at least it's a chapter. Cute one too. Full of technobabble but I had to get the technobabble off my chest or something I suppose. 
> 
> WHO LIKES ROBOTS? I LIKE ROBOTS. WELCOME, FALLOUT 4 PEEPS, I GIVE YOU ROBOTS.

So. Waking up next to someone was... New.

Ted would have expected it to be unpleasant. Like, alright. People have body heat. If he'd woken up feeling like he was laying in a puddle of his own sweat, he wouldn't have been surprised. Even holding hands for any length of time with Amata led to sweaty palms and nervous giggling. But with Harkness, that didn't happen. Neither thing happened. It was like any other morning, except cuddled up against a warm wall of firm muscle that had a calm pulse and unerringly steady respiration.

Well, okay. His sinuses felt a bit more like balloons than usual, and his throught had gunk in it, and he was pretty sure that when he sat up he'd need to blow his nose a time or two. But, y'know. That was pretty standard.

He shifted so that he could crane his neck enough to peer back at the android, wondering if the big lump had gone into some kind of sleep mode. After a couple of seconds, he decided he couldn't really tell. Maybe? With Harkness, who knew. "Hey," he mumbled.

Harkness smiled. Either it had stopped being creepy or Ted had stopped registering it as creepy because it was Harkness. "Morning," the android greeted. And damn if his voice wasn't nice, all low and soft and rough like that.

Sadly though, a chronic case of feeling like ass in the morning got in the way of enjoying it. Ted turned his head away and brought a hand up to cover his mouth as he cleared his throat, wincing. That shit always managed to feel like going over his throat with sandpaper. "Mmnh." Also, being intelligible was hard. "S'uh... Better'n usual so far, gotta say," he said, glancing back and giving Harkness a smile in turn.

Apparently Harkness believed him, because the android let out this little mostly-silent breath through his nose that was like a sigh of relief. Good, 'cause like hell Ted was gonna let his robot feel bad because of general allergies bullshit that neither of them could do much about. "Want me to get you something to drink?" Harkness asked.

Aw. He remembered the meds thing? Ted practically beamed at him. "No complaints if y'do," he replied.

Nodding, Harkness scootched in closer to kiss Ted's cheek, before drawing back and sitting up on the bed with a lot less sluggishness than most humans would've had. Ted missed the warmth immediately even if he had to concede that _holy fuckwaffles_ he seriously had the nicest robot boyfriend ever and this shit was just bananas.

No, really. He had to force himself to wait until Harkness was out of the room to mash his face into the pillow and make incoherent noises about it without being overheard. Holy shit, man. He was sufficiently composed by the time Harkness came back with a couple of bottles of water, but damn if that hadn't improved his morning by quite a bit. So much so that even after he'd taken care of his body's usual demands and blown his nose and managed to get the last of the crap out of his throat, he was still feeling pretty good.

And then he pulled his bottle of meds out of the pocket of his jumpsuit, popped the lid open, and realized that he had four pills left.

Welp.

He knew instantly that telling Harkness (who had wandered off to shave and bathe and all that) would be a bad idea. It'd just make him worry. Besides, if Ted was going to the purifier with his dad, then he'd be surrounded by doctors. And with all the tech they had there - all the chemicals and shit they worked with - they were bound to have the stuff to synthesize more if he got on their asses about it. It'd probably be easier for them than it was for Moira, hell.

That and he really, _really_ didn't want a worried Harkness passive-aggressively badgering him into spending the next few days on his ass while Pinkerton or Preston got him hooked up. Partly because it was what he'd do himself if the tables were turned, partly because he disliked Preston, partly because he'd heard Seagrave's cough and caught wind of Rivet City's rumored epidemic of "rust lung"... Look, he had reasons, alright?

After a moment's mental debate, he shook one of the pills out into his hand and downed it with a mouthful of water. He could ration. He'd done it before. He'd just have to take it easy for the next few days - and avoid being irradiated - while he leaned on his dad and Doc Li. Shouldn't be too hard. Li had proven susceptible to sad puppy eyes if nothing else.

So, he'd decided on a plan of action by the time the pill bottle was back in his pocket: go to the purifier with the egghead brigade, pester them into giving him more meds, come back to Harkness without having to utter a peep about it, and then take him with for adventures. Yeah. That could work. Dressed, refreshed, and feeling pretty damn confident, Ted left his room behind and headed for the Weatherly lobby to see if there was anything resembling breakfast.

And as it turned out, there was. Mutfruit and some kind of sweet pastry thing. Vera was a fucking magician or something, or maybe her Handy was just that well-programmed. Either way, Ted tipped her a few caps extra for it.

It was looking like he was gonna have a pretty decent day.

\---

Harkness caught up with him again in the corridors sometime after breakfast and pressed a thick, heavy coat into his hands. "You'll need this," the android said, looking all stern like he always did in public.

Of course, Ted knew that the stern exterior was bullshit, so he was having a hard time not grinning as he took the coat and held it up to inspect it. "You know I've got a jacket, right?"

"It's raining," Harkness said, as if that explained it.

"Again, I've already got a jacket." Though the coat was pretty kickass, Ted had to admit. Long, thick, lined. Had a hood. Zipper _and_ buttons.

Harkness frowned. "I thought you'd need something with a hood." At that, Ted snorted; Harkness must've assumed that meant that Ted wasn't listening, so he continued, "I also thought your-- _friend_ , the one who gave you that jacket, might not appreciate it if--"

"If I fucked up his jacket?"

"Yes. That." The android's gaze flicked briefly away, as if nervous; Ted got the impression of fidgeting even though there wasn't any fidgeting actively going on, and smirked to himself.

It was hard to decide sometimes whether it was all in his head, or Hark was actually completely fucking adorable. "It's a nice coat," Ted conceded, not missing how Harkness perked up and looked right at him when he said it. It brought to mind a mental image of a very young and beet-red Butch shoving a lopsided origami bird at an equally young Suzie before running away, and he had to fight to keep his composure after he thought of that. "Where'd you get it?"

"Storage." Harkness straightened a little, seeming to gain some confidence. "They were standard-issue on ships like this before the bombs fell."

Ted grinned up at him. "Aw, you stole a Navy raincoat for me?"

The way Harkness glowered at him just made him grin wider. "As chief of security I have the authority to requisition things fr--"

"Stole it," Ted repeated.

"I didn't steal it." The android let out a faint huff. He was definitely pouting. " _You_ steal things."

Okay, yeah. Admittedly a lot less than before, but life in the Vault hadn't exactly enforced strict notions of how property worked. "What can I say? It's cute when you get all grumpy about it."

"Your definition of cute is as skewed as Vera's." Yep. Pouting. Ted knew somewhere in the back of his mind that actually thinking it was fun to make the robot pout at him was probably unhealthy, but hell. Harkness stuck around anyway, right?

Whether it was in spite of or because of the teasing was anyone's guess, though. So just in case, Ted reached up to steady himself with the android's shoulder while he stood on tiptoe to give the pouting robot a quick peck on the lips. "Sorry," he told Harkness. "For messing with you, I mean. I'm not sorry about calling you cute."

When he pulled back, he found that Harkness had a hand bunched up in his jumpsuit, clinging to the loose material. The android's lips were pressed together tightly, brows drawn together, eyes averted. It was a thing he did a lot, Ted had found. Usually it meant the big guy was thinking something over. Sometimes Ted could tell what it was, other times not so much. Harkness could be hard to read, especially when Ted could never figure out how much of what he read into it was just him projecting things.

Sometimes he wondered if the whole thing between them was a product of him projecting. He was so fucked up on so many levels that it was hard to know sometimes what was real and what was a conjuration of his neuroses. But Harkness had brought him a coat; it felt thick and heavy in his hands, the smooth texture of the lining contrasting with the scratchy fabric on the outside. It smelled musty, like it had actually been in a storage closet or something.

That was real, wasn't it? It wasn't programming or obligation that caused Harkness to do that, right?

Shifting the grip on the coat so that it was draped over his arm, Ted took hold of Harkness's hand and gently coaxed those strong fingers into letting go. Then he brought that hand up and kissed the back of those knuckles. Because Harkness was clearly worried, and yet here Ted was being too much of a dumbfuck about whether or not that worry was genuine to actually do anything to ease it like a good boyfriend should.

Harkness stared like he wasn't sure what to do with his hand. "--Ted?" he questioned, uncertain. Hesitant.

"I won't take long, alright?" Ted assured. He didn't know why it sounded insincere to his own ears. Maybe saying it would make it more true. "I'll go help out at the purifier, help the eggheads get done faster. Maybe fend off some muties if I have to. Nothing big, right? Then--" and there, he made himself smile, forced himself to look up. "--then we'll head to Megaton, okay?"

And Harkness believed him, goddamn. Like, actually believed him. Ted felt the android's hand gently squeeze his own, watched a smile form that didn't quite reach those grey-blue eyes. "Yeah. All right."

Shit. Hark trusted him. Ted didn't know if he'd be able to forgive himself should he ever end up breaking that.

\---

The coat around his shoulders felt like a warm embrace warding off the outside as Ted made his way to the Jefferson Memorial along with the previously mentioned eggheads, hood pulled up to keep the rain out of his eyes even as cold water seeped into his shoes.

Miserable, that's what it was. A perfect, miserable example of local weather, the kind that'd normally keep him in his house in Megaton for a couple of days until it blew over. As things stood, he couldn't wait to get back home. Home with Harkness. He'd already hatched a kind of half-plan for getting the android admin privileges to his own system - and it was so, _so_ fucked up that no one had thought to fucking do that in the first place, that Harkness had to deal with getting hacked into like that - and all he had to do was run it by the big guy to double-check that it'd work and that he'd be okay with it.

It'd be a helluva load on Ted's computer though. Might have to turn off the rest of the house's electronics just to make sure it didn't blow a fuse. Definitely have to go through and kill all the extraneous processes so the system wouldn't be overloaded. His setup wasn't half as impressive as Pinkerton's, nor was his generator the salvaged remains of an aircraft carrier's nuke plant.

And Harkness... Eheh. Well, he was pretty sure that Harkness was running on a couple hundred gigabytes of random access memory alone, and whatever power supply the android was using definitely had to be fusion powered, not fission. Had to be. The level of processing power required for that level of advanced artificial intelligence alone, not to mention all the sensory input, was fucking astronomical.

All that made it _very fucking complicated_ to figure out the logistics of trying to run whatever over-arching executable file that made his android tick on a piece of tech that was comparatively about as advanced as a telephone switchboard.

But if it worked, he'd just be running that single file (albeit with all its subdirectories rerouted through a probably sluggish connection) on his machine, while the thing he was hacking would be an inanimate platform with no thoughts or feelings or old fears that he might trigger. It'd be cramped for Harkness to run on so little disk space, but he'd have full access to everything on Ted's rig - he'd be able to see everything Ted was doing, be able to observe without feeling like he was being pulled apart - and Ted could even set it up so that Harkness could stop him at any time.

From there it'd be easy. Hack the platform itself, give program admin access and permission to change settings, drivers, all that. Then let Harkness back in with full access waiting for him.

After that, Harkness would be free. Really free. He could do whatever he wanted. He could even leave. Nothing would be stopping him anymore. Was it sort of fucked up that those were the only kinds of conditions that Ted would really want Harkness to stay for-- that he only wanted Harkness to stay if he were free to leave? Maybe, though Ted figured it better to accept that he was fucked up and give people plenty of space to see it in case they wanted to avoid it.

He was man enough to admit that he was a huge fucking sap about when people actually chose to stay though. Because either they were too innocent to know better - and therefore in need of his protection - or they really did like him the way he was. Harkness was a bit of both, and Ted would seriously never stop thinking that was just the cutest thing.

Again, huge sap. And a sucker for cute things. Even if those cute things were six feet tall and two hundred plus pounds of solid muscle and metal.

Smiling to himself, he tugged the coat tighter around his slight frame and followed the scientist squad inside the memorial rotunda. Just a couple more days, tops. Then they'd be free and clear. They could go book-hunting. Or he could try and figure out what music Harkness liked and they could sniff out some holotapes for the jukebox. Who could say? The possibilities were endless if Harkness would agree to come with him.

Yeah. Fuck what his dad thought. With Harkness, he could do anything.

 


	20. 17: birden

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Androids shouldn't have the capacity to daydream.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> AHAHAHAHAAAAAAAA
> 
> DON'T WORRY I'VE GOT ANOTHER CHAPTER IN THE WORKS COMING SOON

It was the third time in an hour that Harkness had caught himself sighing.

The cold didn't bother him as much as it might bother a human; he registered the reduced temperature in his extremeties with a clinical detatchment, compensating with increased bloodflow and redirection of his internal heatsinks as he disinterestedly flexed his fingers. He was wearing his armor - as was standard procedure for anyone on watch, especially by the drawbridge - but had decided against an overcoat, as it would mean having to borrow one from someone else. He'd given his own to Ted.

See, he hadn't stolen it.

Ted had been gone since 0942 hours, and the weather had yet to improve since then. It was still raining, with an ambient temperature of forty-four degrees fahrenheit and a wind chill of thirty-seven degrees fahrenheit. Normal for the Commonwealth, but unpleasantly cold for DC. And the humidity that came along with it just made the air feel thick and cloying, maybe even oppressive. His guards certainly thought so, many of them reacting to the weather with sluggishness and clear distaste. Some had even tried to feign sickness; were Lana not in charge, they might have gotten away with it.

She'd make a good Chief of Security when Harkness left, he'd decided. The ship would be safe in her hands, perhaps even safer than it'd been in his own. He could hand it over to her and not feel like he was shirking his duties. For that, he was thankful.

They'd be fine without him. He'd made sure. Spent most of the morning and a good portion of the day confirming it to himself. Everyone had a backup. Everything was as safe as he could reasonably make it. He was-- he was as certain as he could be. There would always be that nigh-imperceptible chance that things could go wrong, things he couldn't foresee, but statistically speaking it was so improbable that he couldn't justify prioritizing it.

The rain's steady percussion against the ship did nothing to calm him, nothing to soothe. If anything the randomness of it, the very slight chaos that was inherent such things as the intervals between droplets, was throwing him off even worse. Contributing silently to his anxiety, punctuating his spiraling thoughts even as he tried to reassure himself that he'd done all he could.

Yet more than ever, he was certain that he needed to leave. He had to be free of this anxiety. This nervousness. Because underneath the concern that the ship wouldn't be all right and that his duty wouldn't be fulfilled, there was the worry that if he stayed, he'd be found out and discovered by the Institute and hunted and caught and--

Harkness shivered, resting his elbows against the railing in front of him and leaning heavily against it as a kind of unsteadiness came over him that was all too familiar. Was his fear a programmed response, too? Was it put there on purpose to cripple him? To paralyze him in the face of capture and punishment? He didn't know. Couldn't know without access to his own code. All he knew was that he was afraid-- that all he'd been able to do in the face of that fear was run. Run as far as he could until he was far enough away that the other Coursers wouldn't be able to find him. And even that hadn't been far enough.

His only safety was with Ted, and Ted _wasn't there._

It was frightening to him just how quickly he'd been reduced to a scared, lonely synth without his human around. He hadn't realized how dependent he was up to that point, but the realization made finding independence that much more important. Made him that much more willing to try whatever Ted might be planning for it, no matter what it was. Even if it was-- _invasive_. He'd still do it, if it meant he'd be free of that fear.

And then he could be free to do what he wanted. Whatever he wanted. He could follow Ted anywhere. Even back to the Commonwealth. No human would have power over him again. Not even the ones at the Institute. He could make his own choices without being influenced by what was and wasn't the safest course of action. Maybe then he could hold his human and have it mean something. Maybe he could convince Ted that it wasn't just gratitude that kept Harkness at his side. Maybe Harkness could be... Happy? Was that it?

Maybe it was. Harkness didn't know whether machines could be happy. But he wanted to try.

The door to the marketplace creaked open behind him, causing him to jerk upright and crane his neck to look back. It was Bryan Wilks, poking his head out from the door and wearing an oversized coat that went past his knobby knees; the kid was tall for a twelve-year-old wastelander, but still far from his full adult height.

"Mister Harkness?" Bryan asked, raising his voice over the rain to the point that it cracked.

Harkness made himself smile. Hopefully under bad lighting it wouldn't look so _creepy_ , as Ted called it. "Is there a problem?"

"Aunt Vera says you haven't eaten all day," the kid said, his eyes not quite meeting Harkness's.

"I'm on duty right now, Wilks," Harkness replied. Secretly, he was thankful for the excuse to not have to come in. A part of him wanted to stay on watch until Ted came back. "If Vera wants me to come in, she has to talk to Danvers about someone covering my shift first. And I'm already covering for someone else as it is."

Bryan pursed his lips, so like Vera that Harkness was momentarily caught off-guard. "Why would you wanna stay out here? It's cold and yucky."

"I didn't say I wanted to stay out. It's my job."

"Whatever you say, mister Harkness," Bryan responded, frowning in clear disbelief.

Alright, so maybe Harkness was a shitty liar after all. Even a kid didn't believe him. "I'll be inside in a bit," he promised. "But I was serious about being on duty. Vera better arrange a replacement." Just. A little longer. He wanted to wait a little longer. He knew Ted might take a few days, but he-- he wanted to be there when his human got back anyway.

Bryan shook his head. "Aunt Vera said I'm supposed to make sure you come inside." And it was obvious to Harkness that the kid didn't like the idea, frowning at having to stay outside and probably blaming Harkness for it.

Vera was manipulative as hell, wasn't she? "Go tell her that if she wants to make sure I come inside, she has to come out here herself," Harkness said, using the most authoritative tone he could muster. He wouldn't let her manipulation work. He was above letting sad little kids get to him.

"She said--" Something about what Bryan was about to say made the kid crinkle his nose. "She said something else, too. But I don't think it'll work as good as she thinks it will."

"What did she say?"

"She said she had a... A book?" The kid squinted as if the thought didn't make sense. "I don't get why she thought I should say that though. Books are boring."

Several seconds of silence passed. Silence except for the rain hitting the ship's exterior, rain that hadn't let up since Ted had left. For the fourth time in an hour, Harkness sighed. Then he turned away from the drawbridge to follow Bryan back inside, defeated by curiosity.

Curiosity, and Vera Weatherly.

\---

Harkness stepped into the Weatherly Hotel lobby without any preamble, catching Vera in the midst of a conversation with Seagrave. "Wilks said you had a book for me?"

Seagrave whipped around to look behind him, but surprise only registered for a fraction of a second on Vera's features before her lips curved into a coy smile. She leaned over the front desk to eye Harkness appraisingly. "Look who's finally showed up. Do you even know what time it is?"

"Around seven," Harkness answered. 1846 hours, but Ted had told him to round to the nearest hour. Then he added, "I was on duty." Because he had been, at least in his own way. On duty waiting for his human. His own mission, his own assignment.

Self-appointed. There was a certain pride to be found in that. But Vera didn't see that; instead, she frowned at him in the same way that she might frown at Bryan Wilks. "You need to eat sometime, Hark," she admonished.

Harkness simply frowned right back. No. He didn't need to eat. And somewhere in his processes he found it in himself to wonder at his frustration. There was no reason for it, not one of any substance or merit. His annoyance could be categorized as entirely petulant. And yet--

"Rare to see you turn down a meal, Chief," Seagrave remarked, squinting from under his helmet. "Everything alright?"

"He's worried about Teddy," Vera said, reaching out to pat Seagrave gently on the hand in a way that almost seemed like a reflex. "Come on, Hark. I'll have Buckingham whip up a batch of sweetrolls for you."

They didn't understand. Wouldn't understand, either. Even if he told them, they might not understand. Harkness felt cornered, trapped in his own pointlessly rebellious thoughts. He didn't want to do things for the sake of keeping up appearances anymore. Hadn't wanted to for a while. But these humans cared about the person he appeared to be; if he were human, they'd certainly have grounds for concern under the circumstances. Maybe it would be welcome. Maybe he'd feel some relief in knowing that they cared and wanted to take care of him.

Instead, he resisted. And in doing so he felt a kind of guilt, because he knew they meant well. A human would say it was the thought that counted, but what if the thought was wrong? Was it still meant to be accepted without a word?

Harkness sucked in a deep breath and let it out slowly, wordlessly moving to his customary spot and taking a seat. It didn't matter. He only had to go through a few more days of it, at the most. Then he could analyze the nature of his annoyance and his anxiety without having to worry about either.

"Should've known you'd lie to get me inside," he said, flicking a disapproving glance at Vera.

The woman scoffed, sitting back down in her seat behind the desk to rummage around in it. She came back up with an inch-and-a-half thick book in her hands, sized so that it looked like the kind that might decorate a coffee table pre-war; the words _Wasteland Survival Guide_ were printed in thick, easy-to-read text above the cover illustration. "Who says I lied?"

\---

[ _Robots._

 _The word "robot" originally appeared in 1921, in the Czech play Rossum's Universal Robots by Karl Capek. It comes from a word meaning "compulsory labor". The robots in the story were meant to free mankind from menial tasks so that humanity might be free to live easy, leisurely lives. Like most stories about technological advancement back then, it didn't go well. But the idea sparked a wildfire in the science fiction community, and soon after that the scientific community set themselves on a course to make it more than just fiction._...]

Once again, Harkness found that he'd lost track of time while reading.

He didn't even need to get as far as the table of contents for his curiosity to be piqued. The cover alone was enough; Moira Brown was credited as the author, but the co-author was credited as being one Ted Davies.

Something in his expression must have given him away, because he heard Vera say "thought you might like that" as he was processing it. And when he looked up, she was grinning.

The foreword caught his attention immediately. It came in two parts: one explained the reasoning behind the book's existence and the motivation for getting it published and distributed, and the other was a cynical and profanity-laden passage about humanity being a bunch of stubborn survivalists that ended on a surprisingly hopeful note. Harkness could almost imagine the second in Ted's voice, which was quite a feat considering that meant he'd gotten so used to his human's nasally tenor delivery that he could simulate what the words would sound like in his mind without having to hear them directly.

Odd that he had established such a large bank of sounds to draw from as a reference in such a short time. He went over the first part of the foreword in his mind to see if he could imagine a "voice" to go with it, but came up with only words.

No-- he could imagine them in Vera's voice, with difficulty. There were gaps in the rendering, however. The words didn't quite fit her. There was an earnestness to them that didn't quite fit with Vera's delivery, and when he tried to force it to work the whole thing came across as flat due to the fact that he didn't have the proper phonemes in his databanks to match the inflections that the words implied.

Could he do that with other books? Other voices?

Well, he could do it with his own, but he knew the full range of what sounds he could conceivably synthesize. And as he went over his memory and all the books he'd filed away there, he couldn't help but find a single voice to be grossly inadequate for the task at hand, even one as varied as an android's could be.

So he went back to reading, absently eating whatever Vera saw fit to give him. He was still reading (and still trying to think of possible voices with which to test his newfound "ability"-- Zimmer's? No, that was a voice best suited for villains) when she chased him out of the lobby, her laughter following him out the door as she ordered him to go to bed.

He went to bed reading, and even when he'd finished he was still going over the text in his mind, imagining the bits that Ted had written in Ted's voice and smiling to himself. A small part of his human, tucked away in his memory for him visit anytime he wanted to think of something that made him feel like a runaway synth could actually have a place in the world.

Because Ted had referenced A3-21's holotape-- his _first_ holotape that had made it outside the Commonwealth. Harkness knew because he remembered recording it, even if his own voice was so different that he may not recognize the sound of his old one.

(" _I'm an android, a synthetic man..."_ )

[... _Science fiction has always had its share of humanlike robots. Androids, they're called; synthetic people, made to look like human beings. The degree of imitation is a question of complexity, both in terms of programming and overall appearance..._ ]

In his holotape, Harkness had gone on to say that he was a slave. In the book, Ted went on to encourage kindness and respect towards androids in particular. A large segment of the chapter Ted had penned himself was dedicated to it, even though other forms of robots had gotten a paragraph at most.

All of it was easy to render in the mental simulacrum of Ted's voice, and it made for a pleasant distraction from the fact that he didn't need sleep. Tweaking the program to produce a more faithful reproduction gave him something to do that took up CPU space which might otherwise be left open for things like nervousness to creep into.

He was still toying with it the next morning while on duty by the bridge when a hand clapped him on the shoulder through his combat armor, startling him out of his thoughts.

"Daydreaming?" Lana asked, leaning back against the railing next to him so that her back was to the bridge. Much like everyone else who had been assigned to shifts outside, she was wearing a coat over her armor. The rain had finally let up somewhat, but it was no less cold.

Harkness wasn't bothered by it. If anything, Lana's arrival made him feel mildly overheated; he averted his eyes quickly to look at the sky instead. Was that what he'd been doing? Androids weren't supposed to be capable of that kind of thing at all. Yet human experiences told him that, well. Yes. That was what he'd been doing, wasn't it? "I guess so," he conceded.

Lana chuckled. It was a warmer, richer sound than Vera's laughter. Rarer, too. "You've got it bad for that pipsqueak, huh?"

There was no point in denial - at least, if she was implying what he thought she was - so Harkness only shrugged.

"About damn time someone got you to smile," she said. "No accounting for taste, though."

"The smiling isn't intentional," Harkness told her. "And I'm okay with having what could be considered 'poor taste'." Even his own opinions of Ted had taken time to develop. Time and observation and considerable thought. He was starting to think that maybe humans just weren't wired to take that sort of time to know a person.

He certainly didn't expect Lana to take that kind of time. She had things to do. Important things. "Well," Lana said, pulling out a cigarette from an inner pocket of her coat along with a lighter, "if there's anything I've learned over the years, it's that when you've got something good? Hold onto it."

She struggled for a moment with her lighter, frowning at it as she attempted to get it to spark. Eventually it did, but the flame flickered like it was about to go out; she had to cup her hand around it to protect it from the wind just to be able to light her cigarette. When she finally took that first drag, it was followed with a long, contented sigh.

"It's a big, scary world out there," she said. "But I think you'll be fine."

"It's the world that should be scared of us," Harkness remarked with a faint smirk, remembering something he'd heard along those lines before.

But Lana had stopped listening. She had turned, looking out towards the city with a frown creasing her brow. "Huh," she said.

Harkness blinked. "There a problem?"

"No, thought I heard-- _There!_ " She pointed, and Harkness peered in the direction she was indicating. A vertibird? No, he realized as he listened more closely-- several. More followed along behind the first in close formation. "I thought the Steelers didn't have enough vertibirds for regular drills anymore."

A human would describe the sensation of dread as their blood running cold, or a sinking feeling in their gut. Harkness would describe it as his processes locking for an instant with quiet horror, followed by anxiousness and unease as his system kicked into high alert and his heatsinks and power supply were forced to follow suit. "It's not the Brotherhood," he said.

His eyes were far better than hers, and he'd seen no Brotherhood of Steel emblem on those vertibirds.

"Get everyone inside," he ordered. "General quarters. All civilians and noncombatants need to clear the flight deck. All security staff need to be geared up and ready for a fight before those vertibirds get here."

"What?" Lana narrowed her eyes, taking him by the arm. "Hark, you're not making any sense."

"They're not Steelers, Danvers," he told her firmly, irritation creeping into his voice. "They're Enclave."

It wasn't difficult for him to calculate where they were going, either. Their trajectory could take them to either one of two important landmarks along the river; one was Rivet City, and one was the purifier at the Memorial. Either one could be used as a strategic forward base from which to assault the other, or even for assaulting the Citadel to the west.

And Ted didn't know. Shit.

Without thinking about why or how he was going to do it, Harkness stepped back from his self-appointed post and started off down the bridge. He was a Courser, built for chasing. Hunting. _Running_. He could get there first. He could warn them. Had to warn them.

The bridge underneath him lurched suddenly to the right, almost causing him to stumble amidst a chorus of rusted metal being forced to shift by aging mechanism. He was only halfway to the pier, and already it was moving even farther away from him. Tearing his eyes away from his goal, he turned his head to glare at the one responsible for bringing the bridge back in.

"The hell are you _doing_?" Lana shouted. "You can't just leave! You're the best damn sharpshooter on this boat; if this really is the Enclave, then we need all hands on deck!

For the barest fraction of a second, Harkness hated her for being right.

 


	21. 18: the real folk blues

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Getting close to the end. Or is it the beginning?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> WELL HEY GUYS WANT ANOTHER CHAPTER? GOLLY GEE I SURE DO

One vertibird did try to land.

Harkness told his men to aim for the engines. In turn, he aimed for the pilot; a warning shot, a near-miss on purpose. One shot from the magnum did more to discourage them from landing than all the assault rifle fire his security force could muster, and the thing was swift to turn away from the ship and head for the purifier instead.

Lana made him stay. She was right to do so; he was the ship's best sharpshooter, and the Enclave's initial push to secure the area would be severely crippled if Rivet City stayed out of their hands.

But the purifier only had Ted to protect it. Maybe fully-armed and in power armor, Ted could hold it on his own - Harkness recalled the disassembled set back in Megaton - but he pretty much only had his laser pistol with him. All the mines, all the grenades? Those had been left behind in Ted's room on the ship. None of the others who had gone with him were remotely up to the task, and Harkness classed most of them as noncombatants-- even Ted's father.

Harkness had half a mind to jump ship and haul ass over there, but by the time the city seemed to be safe, the Enclave had begun establishing a perimeter around the purifier. He could see the beginnings of a high-power energy barrier being set up, and at least a dozen suits of power armor stomping around like they owned the place.

Shit, he missed the Commonwealth for once; at least there, he'd had access to methods of long-range communication. The infrastructure for it hadn't been completely trashed like it had in DC, and HAM radios tended to be used rather than dismantled for parts. As things stood, the only way to get any word from Ted (or anyone) reliably was by courier. There was no way of knowing that anyone had gotten out unless someone physically brought that message to the ship.

Inefficient. Unacceptable. Harkness could only stew in his own anxieties because of such inadequacy, and it bothered the hell out of him to know just how helpless he was-- to know that he'd voluntarily had some of his own built-in tech to that effect disabled, cutting off connections that he could've used to reach his human remotely. If he hadn't been so scared-- if he included that on the list of precautions he'd taken when fleeing the Institute--

No. Measures like that had kept him free. There was no way he could maintain a wireless connection to anything while still keeping himself secure. It was pointless to blame himself. Utterly pointless. Might as well blame the fact that he felt affection in the first place while he was at it, since that was equally as pointless.

At some point during the day, Lana squeezed his arm in passing. He supposed it was meant to comfort him. It didn't, but he told himself that he should appreciate the gesture anyway.

Morning wore on into day. Day wore on into evening. Harkness felt every millisecond of time that passed, his system ticking away the hours with unerring precision. Hours. Hundreds of thousands of milliseconds. All of it spent staring into the fog and mist, peering out at the ruins from the flight deck of his ruined carrier. Waiting.

It was 1802 hours when he saw movement. Movement that wasn't a super mutant, or a suit of power armor, or an animal, or a vertibird. Movement that was clad in yellow-striped blue and stained with blotches of muddy red, topped with white. It didn't even take him a second to match the exact shades to those in his memory, to calculate the height of the figure coming out of the ruins to the northwest.

"Send out the bridge," he ordered. The security officer he was addressing didn't even have time to ask what he meant before he'd bolted for the command tower, taking the perilously steep stairs two at a time on his way down.

He'd apologize to Lana later.

\---

Harkness was incapable of losing track of time. He knew how long it took him to reach his human. So in spite of his system calculating that he'd made remarkably good time - telling him he'd moved beyond peak efficiency and into the range where his legs ached afterwards from inadequate shock absorbtion - he felt like he'd taken too long. Everything felt like it had taken too long; he wished he hadn't listened to Lana. Hated that he had done so. Cursed himself to hell and back for being so damned logical.

Because Ted should never had pushed himself to the point of collapse-- should never have needed to. That was what he'd come to Harkness for to begin with.

He didn't even care that they hadn't brought the drawbridge back in by the time he got back. One less thing to delay them, as far as he was concerned. Ted had refused to be carried, but he was still using Harkness as a support to lean against. And Harkness had felt the fluttering pulse under his fingers when he'd pressed them to Ted's neck - could see how pale his human had become, above and beyond the usual - which made him that much more reluctant to leave Ted's side until something was done about it.

That wasn't the worst part, though.

The worst part was how Ted had just... Crumpled. Dropped his laser pistol and sagged into Harkness's arms, like he was incapable of carrying his own weight for much longer. Like he'd been on his feet and running for his life and fighting since the start of this.

For all Harkness knew, he might have been. All that was readily apparent was how worn out the human was, exhaustion plain to see in shaky limbs and ragged breaths. It wasn't all the fault of blood loss, either. Plasma burns to Ted's left arm and shoulder had only bled so much; Harkness suspected that much of the blood on his human's jumpsuit belonged to someone else entirely.

He was hesitant to ask just whose blood it was. It mattered, of course - the people who had gone with his human to the purifier had been Rivet City citizens - but his priority was in getting Ted to the clinic.

"Thanks, babe," Ted mumbled, somewhere between the pier and the ship. Harkness said nothing in response.

Rivet City's people didn't question their head of security. Doors were opened without comment beyond the occasional murmur of _oh my god_ when people spotted the burns, the blood. Harkness kept hold of Ted's hand even when the narrow, tall stairwells of the ship made it difficult.

Doctor Preston was horrified. "Dear God," he said, quickly stepping aside and ushering his newest patient into the clinic. "Inside, both of you. If you'll just sit down, young man--"

Ted seemed to know the procedure of such things as well as the doctor did himself, carefully popping off his pip-boy so that he could unzip his jumpsuit down to the waist and start tugging off his shirt (although he did choose to sit on the counter rather than, say, a chair). "Got any RadAway?" he asked the doctor; his shirt, too, was burnt and stained.

It was hard for Harkness to see. But at least would it would be fixed. That-- that was something.

Within minutes, Ted was hooked up to an IV drip. His pulse was still "abnormally high", as Preston put it, while his blood oxygen levels were apparently low enough that the doctor kept trying to convince the small human to put on an oxygen mask. Ted kept pushing it away, with a kind of quiet exasperation that told Harkness he was used to that kind of thing.

"It will help," Preston insisted.

"Don't need it," Ted replied. Then he smiled, an insincere thing that made it look like he was losing patience. "Thanks anyway."

Harkness didn't know whose side he was on. Well, he was on Ted's, but the question remained whether he was on the side of Ted's free will or Ted's health. "You're sure?" he asked, uncertain.

Ted rolled his eyes. " _Yes_ ," he said.

Right. He hadn't lied to Harkness before when directly questioned, so that only left the things that Ted wasn't willing to say in front of Rivet City's residents. "Leave him be, doctor," Harkness told Preston. "If he says it's fine, then it's probably fine."

Preston huffed. "I'm sorry, is either of you a medical professional?"

"Technically nobody's a medical professional these days, doc," Ted noted. "I'll be outta your sparse and greying hair once the stims and rad treatment start to work, don't worry."

"You're courting disaster, young man."

"Doc, at this point me'n Disaster are way past the courtship stages. More like she and I are to the point where she's okay with a threesome involving her hot best friend Chaos Theory."

Harkness couldn't help his faint snort of laughter, shaking his head. For an instant, he entertained the thought that Ted was probably feeling better if he was making jokes. But then the small human turned his head to look at Harkness directly, and that line of thinking ground to an abrupt halt before it could get very far.

Ted wasn't smiling. His expression was a mask, cold and blank and so very unnatural on his features that Harkness knew - he _knew_ , from the moment he saw it - that Ted was far from feeling better.

Just what the hell had happened at that purifier?

\---

"The Enclave took us by surprise," Ted told a room full of Rivet City's finest, all of them having gathered in the ship's control tower. It was far from the usual city council meeting setup, seeing as a third of the council was missing and Harkness had handed his duties in that regard over to Lana-- more of a concerned citizens' meeting. "I was doing some maintenance for the eggheads when the vertibirds showed up. Assholes announced themselves with a goddamn megaphone. Real subtle.

"I headed back to the main rotunda where the purifier's at, quiet as I could. Goons in power armor all the way. Some I could sneak past, some I couldn't. X01 and Tesla armor suits, didn't see any Hellfire models on-site but I'm sure they'll come into play later. So anyway, I got there, but the delays made it so I didn't get there until after the head of the goon squad was already in the same room as the purifier's main reactor with my dad and a couple of the assistants. Doctor Li and I were on the outside, and we got to watch.

"Suddenly, _bang_. Head goon shoots one of Li's assistants right there. Intimidation tactic. I can tell right there that he's not the smartest goon 'cause he's firing off live ammunition in a main reactor room. That and he's shooting scientists when the whole reason he needs them to cooperate is because he needs them to keep sciencing. So my dad says to give him a minute, he'll do everything up all nice and pretty for the goons to have if they just let him prepare it.

"Then-- then my dad blows the main reactor's containment, with him and the goons still inside."

Ted went quiet for a moment. His hands gripped the edge of the table he was sitting on tightly as he took a deep breath to steady himself; Harkness was amazed at his composure, given the circumstances. Considering what he was having to describe to a room full of people who all probably blamed him to some degree for the course that events had taken. Humans were like that, Harkness had found. They liked to have a figure to blame things on, even if it they weren't conscious of it.

It just so happened that this time, his human was the one in a position to be that figure. "Naturally, this kinda pissed the Enclave off," Ted continued, shifting his weight and idly kicking his feet to and fro. "The remaining goons call in the cavalry, while me and the remaining civvies hoof it down an escape tunnel. This being DC, though, it's an escape tunnel with lots of offshoots. And of course those offshoots have more goons pouring in.

"Diego was the first one to go down," the Vaultie told the room, causing a couple of sharp gasps from people; Father Clifford bowed his head and murmured a prayer. "Got caught in some crossfire. The second was one of the scientists, can't remember the name but he was a well-groomed guy who smiled too much. Stood on a mine, so he couldn'a been too smart."

"What about Madison?" Bannon asked. His voice sounded unusually small, stricken.

"Doc Li's alright. She and another guy survived, some guy named David. Neither of her assistants made it out, though."

The self-appointed leader of the Rivet City Council let out a relieved sigh. "Be thankful for small mercies," he mumbled.

Meanwhile, Lana's brow had knotted with a tight little frown as she'd listened from a few feet away. "Where is she now? Why didn't she come back with you?"

Ted looked at her blandly. "She's with the Brotherhood at the Citadel. Decided she'd rather be there. Heard her saying something about needing a break, and I don't blame her."

"But we need her here," Bannon cut in.

"You entitled fucks run her ragged as it is," Ted shot back. "It's a testament to her character that she stayed this long."

Bannon huffed indignantly. "I don't think you understand, young man," he said. "Our water purifier is on its last legs. Madison and her two bright young assistants are all that have kept it running for years now."

"Thank you for making my point for me," Ted grumbled. "Look, if you people would just let ghouls in, I could get you a half-dozen recommendations for mechanics who know what they're doing--"

"Unacceptable." Bannon's reply was immediate. "What if they went feral? We can't take that kind of risk."

"Well then, I guess you racist dickweeds just have to go thirsty for a whi--"

" _Ted_ ," Harkness said firmly. "Give us names, and we'll take it under advisement."

Ted gave Harkness a sharp look. One that quickly softened, even as Bannon sputtered that Harkness couldn't be serious. "I want your word," he said. "I want you to promise me that this'll get looked into."

"It'll get looked into." Harkness meant it, even if Bannon and the rest didn't. He wasn't even sure why Rivet City had put the anti-ghoul measures into place to begin with; it had been before his time.

But he did have an idea or two about why Ted might want those measures gone. "Good enough for me," Ted answered.

He gave them names. Places where those names could be reached. First verbally, then written down for confirmation after Ted wasn't quite convinced that just saying it would get it through their heads. Very few people in the room still liked the Vaultie afterward; not once during the course of the conversation did he let a racist comment go unnoticed, even going as far as to insult Father Clifford at one point by quoting the Bible back at the old pastor. Apparently, he was done being nice.

Afterward, the small human hopped down from the table, still favoring his left arm even after three stimpaks and a round of foul-smelling ointment of some sort from Preston. "Now, if you people don't mind, I'm gonna go take a nap."

Harkness didn't mind. "Get some sleep, Ted," he said. His human didn't smile, but cool fingertips did brush the back of his hand on the way by. Which was enough for Harkness, even if it wasn't enough for everyone else.

Whatever. Lana could handle them. It wasn't his job anymore. After giving the room one last glance, Harkness went to follow his human downstairs.

Somehow, Rivet City had lost its appeal.

 


	22. 19: kvak

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dark machines that wheeze and breathe and mark the air...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm so goddamn out of it right now you guys have no idea. Mucinex DM works REALLY WELL, but I am also REALLY SLEEPY. Have another chapter.
> 
> ***TW: SUICIDE MENTION***

"You're kinda hovering, babe," Ted commented as they entered his room.

Harkness paused midway to closing the door behind himself. "Hovering?"

"Disregarding personal space for the sake of sticking close to me." His human sidestepped him to get the door without comment, automatically making up for his distraction. Doing what Harkness neglected to do without question, like they'd already fallen into the gaps in each others' patterns. "Don't get me wrong-- it's cute when you're protective."

"If it bothers you, I can stop," Harkness suggested.

"No," his human said, forcing a tiny smile. "I don't mind it so much right now."

That was-- unusual. And awful. If Ted was admitting that he needed support, then-- "If there's anything you want to tell me," Harkness began, his words slow and halting; he wasn't sure if they were the right ones, not in the least, but he had to say _something_ , "then I'll listen. If that's what you need me to do."

There was that smile again. A little more real, but still so fragile and upset. Just seeing it was painful. "Why are you so damn nice to me?"

Hadn't he told Ted before? Back in Vault 112? "I could ask you the same thing," Harkness said. "No one who's been aware of what I am has treated me quite like you do."

Ted chuckled faintly. "I'm no better than the ones that made you, Harkness."

 _What?_ "How can you say that?" No. That wasn't true at all. How could it be anywhere near true? How the hell had Ted gotten an idea like that into his head?

But the human just-- shook his head again. Like he wasn't going to listen. And Harkness knew that he was locked into another downward spiral again. "How can either of us know that I'm not just like them? What if I'm so fucked up that I've just managed to talk myself into thinking I'm doing the right thing? I might not even realize that I was using you until I'd already hurt you."

For several seconds, all Harkness could do was stare while he went over the statement in his mind. Even if some of the implications were insulting or downright hurtful, it wouldn't do Ted any good to say so; even if he did, Ted probably already knew. Besides, Harkness had promised to listen, hadn't he? If Ted needed to vent, then it was only right to let him.

After a few moments, the human slumped. Fell forward so that the space between them was closed again and his face was leaned into Harkness's combat armor. "How can I keep you safe from what I might do to you?" he asked. "You deserve so much more."

Harkness frowned, analyzing what he'd been told. Comparing it to previous bits of data he'd gathered as he brought his arms around his human's slim shoulders, careful to avoid Ted's plasma burns. What Ted was saying matched up with the sort of things he'd said after kissing Harkness for the first time, didn't it? No, wait-- it was more than that. It matched up with the pattern of self-deprecation that followed every time he'd been on his own for any length of time.

And the only person who treated Ted that way, the only one who had reinforced that mentality, had been... Oh.

Shit. "What did your father say to you?"

It was a guess. Harkness was hypothesizing, and he knew he could be wrong. But Ted's bitter laugh told him he wasn't as far off as he could've been, and that made him seethe quietly with resentment. "We argued," Ted admitted. "Last thing I told him was to fuck off. Last thing he said to me was that he was disappointed."

"Sounds like you stood up to him," Harkness said.

"I did, but that doesn't make it less of a shitty note to end on-- ah, hell." Suddenly Ted pulled back, his gaze drifting guiltily downward. "I shouldn't be dumping all this on you, I'm sorry."

Right. Because having emotions was a thing to feel guilty about. "I don't see any reason for you to be ashamed of yourself," he said. "So either I'm missing some highly relevant data or you're malfunctioning again."

Ted sighed, directing a brief glance upwards. With cool, too-pale fingers he took Harkness by the hand - his left, Ted's right - and led him in the direction of the bed. There was an unsteadiness to Ted's gait, something that Harkness had noticed earlier, but... Shouldn't that have gone away? Was his human sick, or more hurt than he'd realized?

That thing Preston had said about the oxygen in Ted's blood-- maybe that was it? Harkness didn't know. He was no expert. All he knew was that when Ted sat down and patted the bed next to himself, it meant Harkness was supposed to join him. So Harkness did exactly that.

"You're not wrong," the human eventually said, not looking Harkness in the eye. "I've got a-- a bug, I guess. Kinda like a programming error in my brain. I don't think like normal people do."

"Your father told me something like that," Harkness said. "I think he was trying to convince me you were a bad idea."

Ted nodded, chewing on his lip. "Did he tell you anything about it?"

"Nothing I was inclined to believe."

"There's a-- a list. A bunch of symptoms." Ted gestured in such a way as to illustrate bullet-points. "My dad's assistant, Jonas. He found the list in the Vault's database and went over it with me. I didn't fit all of them - it's kinda rare that somebody _does_ fit all the symptoms on a list when it comes to most things - just seven or eight out of about ten. Enough for a diagnosis."

"What are the symptoms?"

It looked like Ted had been expecting that question. "Like I said, there's a bunch. Borderline personality disorder, it's... It doesn't sound like a real thing. Or it doesn't sound that bad. But it shares a lot of traits with other disorders so it's kind of a hot mess." He was stalling. Trying to dodge. Harkness could see the shame creeping in again. "According to the diagnosis, I... I'm a hypersexual, manic-depressive, manipulative, overly-emotional, mood-swingy asshole with no self-esteem and suicidal tendencies."

All Harkness's processes jarred to an abrupt halt.

Suicidal tendencies?

There weren't any words. Harkness tried to come up with something, _anything_ , but he kept sticking on that one final, damning point that threatened to swallow up everything that Ted had told him up until then. That his human might end his own existence, just because of some error, some bug that told him he wasn't fit to live... Was that what Ted's father had tried to warn him about? Was it that last, horrible symptom that had made it impossible to see anything but the flaws in Ted's mental programming, just by virtue of how glaring an error it was?

Well, it wouldn't fucking work.

With all the care he was capable of mustering, Harkness took his human's hand and wound his fingers with Ted's much smaller ones. Slowly, gently, he lifted it to his own face, so that he could press soft kisses to those swollen knuckles. All while Ted simply blinked at him, wide-eyed with shock.

"Harkness...?" Even the human's voice was fragile. Harkness furrowed his brow and exhaled quietly, closing his eyes.

He wasn't good with words, but he had to try. "You've never really lied to me," he said, "and you've always kept your promises."

Ted's confusion was clear from his tone. "I, uh... I try to?"

"You do," Harkness insisted. "So it follows that if you tell me you'll do something, you have to do it."

"I-- suppose?"

That was enough. It'd have to be. "I want you to tell me that you won't let yourself die," he said. "Not for anything."

"Not even for you?"

"Especially not for me." That would be the worst outcome of all. Harkness would rather face deactivation himself. And he knew - he _knew_ \- how difficult it would be to keep such a promise, how easily Ted's own body could give out long before his will to live would. But the alternative? Unthinkable.

Ted didn't respond after that, not right away. When Harkness looked at him it was easy enough to see the uncertainty there. A thousand questions had to be running through that sharp mind. Questions of logistics and impossibilities and doubts and whatever the long-term goal of the thing they had between them might be, or if there was even a long-term goal at all. Harkness knew, though-- he knew that Ted would do whatever it took to keep a promise once he'd made it. Even if he didn't think he could, he'd try.

It was just how the small, malfunctioning human worked. And it was what made him good enough for Harkness to want to keep him. "Please," Harkness said. His own voice sounded small and strange to his auditory sensors. "Tell me you won't make me live in a world that doesn't have you in it."

Ted made a noise somewhere between a snort of laughter and a poorly-muffled sob, shaking his head. "You asshole," he muttered. "I'm telling you how godawful an idea it is to stay with me, and you just--" With a frustrated noise, he tugged his hand back to rub at his eyes. "I promise I won't die if I can help it. There. Y'happy now, robot?"

Harkness felt the tension melt away, his system accepting the answer as an unquestionable, irrefutable truth. His human had given him no reason to think otherwise. Not once. Even the purifier thing hadn't led to any broken promises. Ted kept his word, so his word was enough. "Maybe not happy, but definitely a bit more content," Harkness conceded. "I'm sorry I forced you into it, but I'm not sorry that I got what I was aiming for."

"Heh." Ted grinned up at his android even though he looked like he might be about to fall to pieces. "For what it's worth, I still think you should leave after I fix you up. I'm a pain in the ass to live with. You'll hate me eventually."

No. Harkness had run the numbers. The sorts of things Ted would have to do to make Harkness hate him were so statistically unlikely to happen, so improbable, that there was no point giving them any consideration. Ted could be frustrating, exasperating, exhausting, but those things couldn't make Harkness hate him.

The words to communicate such things were hard to find, though. So Harkness resorted instead to winding an arm around his human's shoulders and tugging him close. Close enough to faintly register Ted's pulse, still a touch too fast to be normal but not dangerously so as it had been earlier.

He couldn't fix Ted's errors or change how his human malfunctioned, but he could keep Ted safe enough from himself and the outside world to deal with them.

"Guess now would be a bad time to mention I never took my meds today," Ted remarked, letting out a nervous chuckle.

Of course. "You just have to make things difficult, don't you?"

"Not too difficult. I just need to get home and get more from Moira." Those colorless eyes stared up at Harkness, crinkling around the edges with a smile. "All you need to do is get me home safe tomorrow. You can handle that, right?"

Yeah. Harkness could handle that.

\---

They slept. Or at least, Ted slept. The arrangement was the same one they'd fallen into two nights before, except with less hesitation as they fell into their respective positions. Harkness didn't mind it at all since it gave him the chance to act as protective as he was feeling for a few hours, his human's safety and health having become that much more of a pressing issue for him after their conversation.

He was not unfamiliar with suicide. When he was with the Institute, he had met many synths that would rather cease functioning than go back or continue existing as a slave for another day. Sometimes they provoked him, forcing him to put them down, but a handful had ended their own existence. He'd learned quickly not to fight other synths around power generators and easily accessible electrical currents if he was supposed to be bringing them back unharmed.

Towards the end, he'd taken to letting them end themselves if that was their choice. In his final weeks spent in the Commonwealth he'd caught himself wondering several times if he wouldn't do the same in their position.

But Ted's words implied something different entirely. From what Harkness had gathered, his human's self-image was so poor that Ted thought he'd be doing the world a service-- and thoughts like that were apparently part of a greater malfunction. Likely it was that very same malfunction that had him thinking Harkness felt no affection for him, and that all he was capable of was manipulation and emotional blackmail. The same malfunction that made Ted question the legitimacy and merit of everything he felt.

Harkness couldn't imagine what that must be like. His only trouble with his emotions was in categorizing and controlling them, since solidly objective definitions were hard to match to subjective data. Even in that, he suspected that he had less trouble than a human might; his pathways and his thoughts just worked that much more quickly, with less data loss along the way from preconceived notions and personal opinions on top of that.

It was his analysis that he was frequently unsure of, because analysis was essentially hypothesizing until he had enough data and repeat performances to turn it into a proper theory. When dealing with humans, however, even theories he'd thought were fairly grounded could be proven incorrect, and statistical likelihoods could be overturned by individuality and general human obtuseness.

If he were in Ted's situation, Harkness knew that he would surely be paralyzed by indecision at even the slightest shift in situation. Yet Ted almost never was. In fact, Harkness could see how the data he'd gathered matched almost perfectly with the way Ted's malfunction was said to work, because Ted actively fought every aspect of his diagnosis.

More than ever, Harkness was convinced that the small human snoring faintly in his arms was remarkable.

Ted didn't wake until long after sunrise. Grit clung to his pale eyelashes and a dusting of patchy, rough stubble had taken up residence along his jaw. Whenever he inhaled through his nose, Harkness could hear the congestion in his sinuses. Mucous and lingering tiredness clung to his voice until he eventually cleared his throat.

"Mornin'," the little human mumbled, smiling. Harkness reciprocated with a kiss on the forehead and a smile of his own.

"Sleep well?" he asked.

"Mmhm." Ted shifted and stretched lazily, not bothering to stifle his yawn. "Y'make a good pillow."

Harkness doubted that, but the comment made him feel slightly overheated nonetheless. "Do you feel well enough without your medication to go down to the lobby to eat, or should I bring you something?"

"Breakfast in bed? Jesus, you spoil the fuck outta me." His human chuckled. "I'm not complaining, s'just... Damn. You're too good t'me, y'know?"

No matter how many times Ted said it, Harkness still didn't believe it was even the slightest bit true. "I'll get Vera to put something together for you," he said, leaning in just long enough to press his lips to the top of Ted's fluffy, malfunctioning head.

He left the room trying very hard not to laugh, because Ted's response had been to shove at him with a bubbling giggle and a declaration that he was a mushy-ass robot. Which wasn't too wrong, if Harkness was getting his colloquialisms right. Yes, he was "mushy". So was Ted in his profanity-laden way. It worked for them, and Harkness couldn't see a legitimate reason not to be open and honest about his affection. To be fair there seemed to be more risk inherent in not being open about it at that point, given the revelations of the night before.

Ted needed to know that he was cared about. So Harkness went to go get his human some breakfast.

Vera's smile as he entered the lobby was tinged with something sad. It was during the off hours, so she was the only one in. "Word on the street is that you're leaving," she said. "This gonna be a permanent thing?"

"Probably," Harkness answered. A twinge of something tugged at his processes. Guilt, maybe, although analysis of the feeling revealed that it wasn't tied to Rivet City at all. More that he felt some regret for the fact that, after spending so much time on the boat and getting to know its inhabitants, he felt no guilt at all about the act of leaving. "Can you have something delivered to the room before we go? He's not doing too well."

"Yeah, I heard. Poor thing doesn't have anyone now, does he? Except you, I mean." Vera frowned to herself as she pushed her chair back and stood, smoothing out her dress reflexively. "It's so sad. He's such a little sweetie."

"He'll be okay once I get him home," Harkness assured her. She lifted her head to peer at him, brow furrowed.

"Take care of him, won't you?" she asked. "I don't care what Three Dog calls him on the radio, he's just a boy."

Harkness had to smile. "I think he takes care of me more than I take care of him."

\---

Lana saw them off. She was the only one who did, and even then it was only because someone needed to pull in the bridge behind them to keep the city secure.

"Be careful out there," she told them, nodding respectfully to Harkness. Were he human, or better able to interpret things that went unsaid, he might have said that something wordless passed between them.

As it was, all he did was nod back and try not to look too confused. "We will. Good luck, Danvers."

Harkness had packed all of his things into a duffle. It probably said something about him that all of his things could fit into a single duffle. All he had were his books, some clothes, ammo, and a spare assault rifle that Lana had made him take from storage. Ted also had a single duffle, but it was stuffed to bursting with things he'd scavenged, as he'd been using his room at the Weatherly as storage for a month or so. He also had his pockets, his jumpsuit, the pouches from a partial set of combat armor, and part of Harkness's duffle which he'd managed to fill with even more things. Most of it was tape, glue, screws, and broken-down weapon parts though.

Explained why there'd been so much of that sort of thing in his house, at least.

"Are you sure you can carry all that?" Harkness had asked.

"Yep," had been the reply. Then Ted had given him a mildly insulted look. "What, you think I'd make you be the pack mule when you're already doing bodyguard duty? Hell no. Now just lemme know if you need me to spot you some caps for ammo, Flak can be stingy about the magnum rounds if he isn't given incentive to part with 'em."

At first Harkness wasn't sure whether to count it as a good thing that Ted had weighed himself down enough to make running difficult. On the one hand, the human didn't need excitement without access to meds and being weighed down would probably mean taking frequent breaks that Ted would never allow for without an excuse otherwise. But on the other, it would make any encounters with hostiles far more difficult on both of them, and escape would be downright impossible; after thinking about it, Harkness decided that he could handle the latter possibility if it meant his human wouldn't have to stress himself out too badly about leaving things behind and having to go back for them.

All of that was rendered moot, however, by the curious lack of trouble they were faced with along the way.

The rain of the past couple of days had dissipated, leaving the ruins cold and damp as the two of them trudged on through. Enclave vertibirds soared high overhead, loud and utterly lacking in subtlety, and Ted had taken to glaring up at them and flipping them off when they passed. None of them landed, but the message was clear: DC was no longer ruled by anarchy. The Enclave was bringing the notion of a police state back to their corner of the country and they fully intended to rule through intimidation, much like their predecessors in the old government had just prior to the war.

"In a few days, people are gonna get used to this," Ted remarked idly as he shifted the weight of the duffle slung over his back. "Every asshole in the downtown area's spooked right now, but the Enclave can't maintain this for shit. Their goons get their asses handed to 'em by a sick kid with a laser pistol? Yeah. The locals'll fight back, trust me."

"The locals don't have power armor," Harkness pointed out. "Or energy weapons."

Ted snorted and shook his head. "Doesn't matter. The locals will be pissed as hell that some assholes in fancy suits are trying to muscle in on their turf. And the Brotherhood's started recruiting those locals, so power armor and energy weapons will end up in their hands soon enough."

True. But even the Brotherhood weren't necessarily good. "I don't know that I support the Steelers taking over, either."

"Elder Lyons doesn't want to take over. He wants to help." Ted snickered after saying it, like he knew how ridiculous it sounded. "S'why the Outcasts left to begin with. They think Lyons has gone soft on the rampant imperialism front. Honestly, my main worry is what'll happen when Lyons dies. His daughter's okay, I guess, but she's better at leading troops than entire peacekeeping forces. I feel like she'd be too easy to influence in the wrong ways."

"You'd know better than I would."

"Shit, that's right. You haven't met these folks like I have." No, Harkness hadn't met any of them. Couldn't even connect names to faces. "Just to play it safe, let's not drop any hints as to what you are around those guys if you ever do meet 'em. I can't guarantee that some of the less friendly elements won't try to strip you for parts the moment they find out."

"That's if they find out," Harkness said, "and if they ever catch me."

Ted didn't know what a Courser was, nor had he ever seen the full extent of Harkness's capabilities; he chuckled and nodded anyway like he had. "Got a point there, babe," he said. "Hell, you could take on the whole Enclave by yourself, I bet."

Probably. "If they gave me a reason to," Harkness answered.

His human smiled knowingly. "Well, I'll try to be good and not be that reason, alright?"

Yes, Harkness would appreciate that.

 


	23. 20: crystalized

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He won't, but he can.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is, IMO, a very important chapter for Harkness. It establishes a lot of things for him and about him. Towards the end it just got easier and easier to write, and I'm just kinda marvelling at how it's turned out even though it ran a bit longer than expected.
> 
> I just wanna hug my cute robutt okay.

The first thing Ted did when he got back to Megaton was drop off his things at the house. Everything. All in or around the chair that Harkness favored.

"If I sit down now, I'm never getting up again," he told Harkness. "Gotta see Moira first. Then food. And after that, we'll get you fixed. Okay?"

"You could let me do it," Harkness suggested.

Ted let out a bubbling laugh, which probably meant he thought the suggestion was ridiculous; Harkness frowned at his back as he headed for the door, but the dingy yellow numbers on the back of the jumpsuit weren't about to react to being frowned at, so in the end Harkness resolved to follow his human instead just to make sure that nothing happened.

Megaton, it seemed, had no real structure to its layout. Everything that wasn't structures on stilts was haphazard catwalks made of old plywood and sheet metal, none of which seemed particularly safe to Harkness. Yet somehow Ted was having no trouble navigating it - nor did it so much as bow under Harkness's weight - so it had to be holding together somehow, even if Harkness couldn't see why or how.

As they walked between the platforms and walkways and rooftops, Ted took the time to point out places of interest with his usual colorful descriptors. "That's Moriarty's place," he'd say. "Shitty food, worse beer, and don't get me started on the beds. It'd be better if he gave a molerat's pimply ass about quality, but he just likes being the biggest establishment in town." And so on. The clinic, the local cult dedicated to the end of the world, the restaurant, and the common room.

Moira's place, as Ted called it, had "Craterside Supply" written in chalk on a sign next to the door. It looked like the severed front end of a large passenger jet that had been tipped onto its nose and leaned against the walkway. Harkness wasn't entirely sure how it stayed in place, but Ted didn't seem to care; the human walked in without a thought for whether or not the makeshift building would fall down. It was with no small amount of reluctance that Harkness followed him in.

"Hey, Moira! You in today or should I come back tomorrow?"

A round, cheery face poked out from a doorway, adorned with smudges, a bandana, and welding goggles. The woman gasped, and soon after that she let out a squeal that could best be described as ear-splitting. "Teddy!" she exclaimed, before bounding out past the counter to gather the Vaultie up in a fierce embrace that mashed his face into her chest.

Harkness blinked. And blinked a bit more. This was the woman Ted spoke so highly of? Didn't-- didn't he dislike nice, friendly people?

"I was so worried about you!" she babbled, letting go of him only to bring her rather dirty, gloved hands up to squish his cheeks. Or she was just tugging his face up to inspect him and the cheek-squishing was just circumstantial. "Are you okay? I heard about what happened on the radio, it's just _awful!_ Those mean old Enclave brutes--"

"M'fine, Moira," Ted said with a faint chuckle. "Just need some more meds, that's all."

"Oh! Oh, no, I forgot all about that, didn't I?" She let go of him to clap her hands onto his shoulders. He winced, but Harkness wasn't sure the woman noticed. "I'm so sorry, after everything I was just so busy, Mister Simms asked me to fix up the deputy and I had to help Walter shore up the walls-- But don't you worry, I'll get _right_ on your medicine, okay? That is absolutely, definitely a top priority thing--"

Ted shook his head, grinning. "Moira, seriously. No rush. If it takes a while, that's fine. I'll just take it easy for a few days."

Moira's sweet features crinkled up with concern. "Oh, sweetie! You're not out already, are you?"

"Psh, of course I'm not." It was a boldfaced lie that even she could see through, her hands settling on her hips; Ted was quick to amend his statement before she could scold him. "Alright, alright, so maybe I'm running a little lower than anticipated. Seriously, though, don't force it into your schedule if you've already got work to do."

Harkness cleared his throat (unnecessary, but he'd found it a useful thing to do when trying to gain a person's attention). "Ma'am, if I may?"

The woman looked up at him, straightening her posture so that she was closer to his eye level than Ted's. She was taller than average, with at least four inches on the Vaultie. For a few seconds, she simply stared; however, soon after that she burst into action again, gasping dramatically with her hands flying up to her mouth.

"Oh! I didn't mean to ignore you, I'm so sorry! Goodness, where are my manners?" She thrust one of her hands out towards him, still gloved and greasy; he took it tentatively and found her grip to be a good deal firmer than he'd expected when she shook his hand. "I'm Moira. Moira Brown. Mechanic, scrap dealer, and the author of the Wasteland Survival Guide."

Harkness smiled. Right. So that was the voice he'd put to the rest of the Guide when he went over it in his head. "Pleasure to meet you, Miss Brown."

"Please, just Moira." She beamed right back at him as her hands returned to her hips. "So! Is there anything you'll be needing help with today? Repairs? Trading?"

"Moira, this is Harkness," Ted told her before Harkness could say anything, and she gasped again.

" _Really_?" Harkness was frankly amazed by the woman's capacity for enthusiasm, demonstrated by how she took his hand again and shook it that much more fiercely. "Oh, it's so good to meet you! Teddy's told me all about you."

All about him? "Just what has he said about me?"

"Oh, just that you're the chief of security for all Rivet City. But really, is it true?" Moira was downright starry-eyed. "Do you really remember what things were like before the war?"

Harkness blinked at her, staring openly for several seconds, then looked slowly over to his human. "That's what you told her?"

And his human just shrugged, grinning like the clever little shit he was. Of course he would remember the implanted memories. Of course he'd use them as a cover story, just like Harkness had been doing back in Rivet City. He was keeping Harkness safe. "What'd you think I was gonna tell her?"

So Harkness would have to do his part to keep himself safe too. "Well, you could tell her how I kept that deathclaw from ripping you apart," he replied, returning the grin with one of his own. He tried not to think about whether or not it might look uncanny. "What made you think the grenades would work?"

"Hey, fuck you, I still totally think we could've outrun that thing."

"And I'll still say that your tactics only managed to piss it off."

"You two took down a _deathclaw_?" Moira whispered, awed.

Ted beamed at her. "Damn straight we did." He flicked a glance at Harkness and gave him a wink, fleeting enough that he might've missed it if he hadn't been looking. So obfuscation was the correct answer after all. Right. Harkness managed to relax somewhat after that; speaking up at all had been a gamble.

Maybe he really was getting better at talking to people.

\---

After a half hour of telling Moira wild tales of their adventures (with Ted doing most of the storytelling and Harkness mostly just filling in details from time to time), the pair of them went to get something to eat at a place called the Brass Lantern, only a few meters away from the disarmed bomb. Being in such close proximity to it made Harkness uneasy, although he didn't quite realize how stiff he was until he jerked when Ted tapped him on the arm with a spoon.

"Wanna head home?" the Vaultie asked.

Harkness frowned. "You're not finished eating?" It was true. And Ted needed all the nutrition he could get, even if the amount of nutrition he might get from a bowl of mirelurk bisque was questionable.

"I can take it with me," Ted replied with a shrug, before tossing a few caps onto the counter and picking up his bowl to do just that, hopping down from his wobbly barstool. "C'mon, let's go. --Thanks for the meal, Leo." The last bit was addressed to the man behind the counter, who waved dismissively without looking at them as he stared at the flickering light coming from one of the shop's titular lanterns.

Harkness concluded that this 'Leo' person was probably high.

They got back to the house, and Ted's usually clever fingers fumbled slightly when he went for his keys and tried to sift through them one-handed. Harkness took the keyring from him and wordlessly pulled out the correct key, unlocking the door as his human mumbled a tired _thanks_. He had to wonder how much of that tiredness was caused by a lack of medication and how much of it was caused by everything else going on in Ted's life; he couldn't tell whether the exhaustion was mental or physical or both.

And here he was, implying through his very presence that he wanted the human to give more still. Wanting to be fixed. To be kept safe. It felt selfish to want in the face of everything Ted had already given, in the face of all the Vaultie had been through.

So it was with a tone of apology that Harkness said "You should probably get some rest after you've eaten" after closing the door behind them.

"Yeah, that's not gonna happen," Ted responded without missing a beat, shuffling over to sit down in front of his terminal on the floor and hit the button to turn it on, his cobbled-together server towers whirring to life. Right. So he was still intent on helping Harkness first, tiredness be damned. That was just like him, really. But it didn't really help Harkness to feel better at all.

What was this? This new feeling, this-- _nervousness_. All of it associated with his wanting to be independent. Deeper than surface-guilt and gratitude. He couldn't figure it out. Was it because Ted was the one doing it? Maybe. Sort of. Except not really? He didn't know. His processors were racing, trying to puzzle out the new not-quite-fear.

He was jolted out of it when Ted spoke up again, partly muffled by a mouthful of bisque. "Pretty sure I've got this figured out," his human said. "I've tried to narrow down what's scary about all this for you, and I think I've got it pretty much pinned so we can keep it to a minimum. Hopefully I won't have to access _you_ at all, just your platform."

"My platform?" Harkness repeated, blinking.

"Yeah. Uh, hang on. I'll try to explain." The spoon was set down, and Ted shifted so that he was facing Harkness instead of the terminal. "What makes you, y'know, _you_ \-- that's just software, alright? Very, very complex software, but software. Everything else - your body, your 'instincts', your operating system - that's the platform that the software's running on. Then the software relies on the save state in your data storage to shape you into the person you are."

The nervousness came back with a vengeance. It made sense, but it still didn't explain how-- "So how would you access my platform without accessing me?" Was-- was Ted going to shut him off? Was that how it was going to work?

"I think I can run that software on my rig. If not, I can network with my pip-boy and Moira's setup at the shop and get some kind of array going to handle the processing capacity if I have to." Ted offered an apologetic grin. "I'm hoping I won't have to do that. Probably won't. Point is, you'd never be inactive, even if I had to shut your platform down or whatever. You could watch what I'm doing and communicate with me - veto anything I wanted to do - and you'd have full access to everything on my computer. Admin access, just like what I've got."

Harkness stilled, openly staring for the several seconds - not milliseconds - it took for him to go over that information.

Full admin access to-- to Ted's system? To a human's data and code? The same way humans had so often accessed him, but-- _not_ a violation? He was being invited to do so?

Oh. That... that was--

"How's that sound to you?" Ted asked him. It occurred to Harkness that the human probably had no idea how intimate that sort of suggestion would be. "My rig's networked to my pip-boy, so you'd get to poke at that too if y'liked. Actually, that's not a bad idea. Once we get security figured out for you so you can't get hacked again - y'know, block the right ports, set up some firewalls, whatever we can do to that effect - you could probably just hook straight up to it. Send messages'n shit. Pip-boy monitors my vitals too, so that'd be easier for you..."

"Sounds fine," Harkness said in a rush. Because if his human kept going, he was certain he was going to overheat. Permanent access. Unfiltered by blocks and clearance levels and user restrictions. He could do anything, see any file he wanted to see. Modify or change anything he liked, permanently leaving a timestamp for when he'd been there. Sure, he probably wouldn't. But he could. Ted was letting him.

And afterward, he'd have the power to deny or grant access as he wished, too. He would never be violated again. The enormity of that prospect-- he wasn't sure he had the words for it. It was a surer solution than even the ones the Railroad could conceivably offer.

But he should probably say something, shouldn't he? So... "Thank you," he managed to get out, his voice barely more than a whisper.

Ted snorted. "Don't thank me until we're done."

\---

Everything in the house was turned off except for the computer and all its attatchments. The house was lit by the terminal's eerie green glow, the similar glow coming from Ted's pip-boy, and a lantern that had been set down on the floor nearby. The possibility existed that the computer would draw so much power that it would trip a breaker, according to Ted, which would then lead to everything he was doing being truncated in turn. Along with Harkness.

"It wouldn't shut your platform down, but it could put bugs in the code if I happened to be messing with it at the time," Ted explained as Harkness went around turning off lights. "And I don't wanna subject you to any, y'know, gaps in your awareness if I don't have to. Like I said, I want this to be as not-scary as possible for you."

"This is probably the least scared I've been when it's come to big procedures so far," Harkness told him honestly; Ted just laughed.

Soon, the only sounds in the house came from either them or the computer. Even the Mr. Handy was silent, switched off and stowed away in its designated room. The chair Harkness had favored on his first visit had been pulled closer to the terminal and padded further with a pillow and a couple of teddy bears; Ted told Harkness to get as comfortable as he could. Then the human brought out the necessary cables and comfort took a backseat to anxiety.

It didn't feel right to have Ted be the one standing over him, running cold fingers over the back of his neck. Like that alone was a violation of what his system accepted as fact. He hated how his voice shook when he told the Vaultie how to find the right spot. Hated it because it was Ted and those facts were still inviolate. There was no reason to be nervous.

"Hey," Ted murmured, so close to his ear that it made him suck in a sharp breath. "You okay?"

"I'm fine," Harkness insisted. He was. Had to be. There was no reason to not be. He gripped the arms of the chair tightly. He was fine. Nothing he couldn't handle.

But Ted sighed. His fingers fell away, and the tension in Harkness's shoulders went with them. "D'you wanna do it instead?" he asked, holding the cable up to indicate what he meant.

And that-- that was. Better. Yes. "Alright," Harkness said, taking the cable from his human to... To hook himself up, instead of having someone else do it. He didn't remember ever having done it that way.

His system acknowledged the connection immediately, taking note of it; Ted put a hand on his shoulder and smiled. "You good?"

"I think so," Harkness replied. It felt more sincere that time. Part of him railed against the very principle of it, like doing so was just a way of giving in, but he ignored that part. It wasn't giving in, not really. It was more like... Consent. That meant something, didn't it? Something significant.

Nodding to himself, Ted went to plop back down on the floor in front of his terminal, clapping his hands and rubbing them together. "Right. Next part. You've gotta request access over that connection and I've gotta properly grant it."

Requesting access? Harkness definitely wasn't used to that. Closing his eyes, he focused on the connection. Poked at it. Examined the parameters of it. It felt slower than what he was used to; he was certain that there was a lag, a bit of latency when he sent a signal down the wire. He waited. It felt like an eternity before he heard Ted shift, nimble fingers tapping away at loud, aged keys. And then--

> _userid: sys_a3-21_

He was in. Well, not _in_. Not yet. But he could-- he could _feel_ that there was a new partition there. As open to him as any on his own system. But Ted had said he would have full access, so maybe...

> _open c:\users\td_2258\documents\_

 _c:\users\td_2258\documents\  
_ _ _robot\  
_ _ _dad\  
_ _ _bountylol.png  
_ _ _MORIARTY GTFO MY NETWORK.txt  
_ _ _moriarty im serious i will virus u.txt  
_ _ _survdraft1.txt_  
_ _survdraft2.txt_  
_ _survdraft2 EDIT.txt_  
_ _survdraft2 EDIT FINAL.txt_  
_ _survdraft2 EDIT FINAL FINAL.txt_

...Well.

"Did you actually end up... 'Virus'-ing him?" Harkness had to ask.

"Yep. His bartender tells me that his terminal actually caught fire." There was a smirk to Ted's voice; Harkness didn't need to look at him to know that it was there, curving his lips and crinkling the corners of his eyes. "Well, alright, it wasn't a virus so much as it was a DDOS attack."

"How did you manage a denial of service?"

"I have a supercomputer and he doesn't. C'mon, the dude left himself wide open mooching off my network like that. I leave it open for Moira, not for leeching assholes."

Harkness flinched away from the connection, feeling his breath catch. "It's not open now, is it?"

"No." Ted's response was quick and firm. "You're safe, babe. Right now it's locked up tight, just you and me."

"Alright." Harkness paused, poking at the files again. "What's that image file?"

"Open it and see."

So Harkness did. And it seemed to be a monochrome, low-quality photograph of a document of some sort. After analyzing the document, he opened his eyes and leveled a frown at Ted. "Who would be willing to pay a thousand caps for your head?"

"Tenpenny, apparently." Ted grinned at him. "I refused to blow up Megaton. He says I've ruined his good view of the landscape."

"And the text files? You could have kept numbering them."

"That's boring though."

"Makes more sense than..." Harkness gestured to the terminal vaguely. "Than whatever it is you're doing."

Ted cocked his head. "Well, you could rearrange them if you wanted." Oh. Right. Harkness could do that, couldn't he?

Closing his eyes again, he let out a breath through his nose as he went methodically through the files and numbered them based on where they seemed to be in the editing order. He found another three of them in completely seperate folders, too, after doing a search of the drive for anything labeled _survdraft_ ; a cursory read-through told him where each belonged in chronological order in comparison to the others, and he shifted them into the _documents_ folder along with their counterparts.

By the time he'd finished, he already felt a little giddy. It had taken him about a minute, but it had been a minute of messing around on a human's system. In a human's files. If they were in a rich text format, he might have even put in annotations. Corrections. Criticisms! He could even edit them freely if he wanted-- or delete them entirely! He could do anything, _anything_ he wanted within Ted's system. Go into the OS itself. Reprogram the keyboard inputs, invert the image on the monitor. Render the computer inoperable to anyone but himself.

He wouldn't. But he could.

When he looked down Ted was smiling at him, soft and gentle. "Having fun?" his human asked him. Fun? It was more power, more privilege than anyone at the Institute would ever think to give him. He'd had power over his fellow synths when they saw fit to give it to him, but he was never allowed to be on the same level as any human.

Saying it was fun didn't begin to do it justice.

"Well, we've got a ways to go yet, so uh." Ted cleared his throat and quickly turned his gaze back to the screen. "Let's get started, alright?"

 


	24. 21: gloria

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> What is fear if not a thing to be overcome?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If there is to be any awkward smutting I want it to get its own chapter, seperate from the plot. So that everyone who wants it can have it and everyone who would rather gloss over it and have their headcanons to themselves can do that also. (I still want to write it though.)
> 
> I am way too amused by how Harkness promptly did the equivalent of turning off explorer.exe when given control of his own workings. He's such a dork and I love it.

Harkness was beginning to see a pattern of Ted's plans not always coming out the way they were supposed to. However, he was also seeing a pattern of his human being exceptionally good at improvising.

Even Ted's supercomputer wasn't able to handle the amount of processing required for an android, they'd found. Too slow. Too cramped. Too many lock-ups. Too much danger of overheating and crashing. Ted growled something along the lines of "to hell with solid state, this is quantum computing shit right here" while Harkness was still reeling from coming back to his own platform. It meant little to him; all he knew was that he'd hated the sensory deprivation, the agonizingly slow processing that came with having to utilize every ounce of space available just to form a thought. Completely non-viable with the level of technology they had.

Maybe if Ted were working with military-grade electronics instead of scrounged consumer electronics. Maybe if they had enough of a network to form some kind of massive array, the kind you'd have in a vault with a hundred people who all had pip-boys and personal computers plus the vault's own systems. Hell, maybe if they had even a scrap of the level of technology that the Institute possessed.

That was how Ted's rant went before he slammed his fist into the floor hard enough to briefly artifact his pip-boy's screen and cause its light to flicker.

"Would accessing my system without all this be simpler?" Harkness asked. As much as he didn't want to, he could half-believe that he'd be more alright with it if it were Ted doing it and if he were asking for it to happen. Right?

But Ted shot him a glare. "Like hell I'm doing that," the Vaultie said, returning to his keyboard. And even though Harkness felt the tension in his muscles ease at that, he knew that it was a step backward. They weren't getting anywhere. Ted needed time to go through his code and fix him, and that wasn't going to happen without-- without that code being accessed and picked through, line by line if necessary.

Harkness suppressed a shiver at the thought. No, he wouldn't be all right with it. Even imagining it as Ted's clever, gentle fingers doing the prodding still didn't change what it was. In some ways it even made it worse; his system balked at the idea of his kind, wonderful human doing those things, as all the data he'd gathered so far made it next to unthinkable. Somehow he'd coded it into his processes that Ted's morality was unimpeachable, working it into his calculations that his human was the absolute polar opposite of the kinds of humans he'd known at the Institute. Diametrically opposed to the likes of Zimmer and Ayo, immune to the sort of thoughtless cruelty that Father frequently initiated.

Ted was good. Ted did not do horrible things like dabbling in synths' code. Harkness was certain of that much even if it was the one certainty in his life. But to make it impossible for anyone to do that again, Ted would have to dabble in his code.

It was terrifying.

"Okay, uh..." Ted swallowed thickly, glancing beween Harkness and his screen. "I might still be able to do this. I've got a couple of ideas, so--"

"Ted." Harkness was distantly aware that his voice shook under the weight of that syllable. His fear, his anxiety-- they had his chest in his vicelike grip that he couldn't manage to loosen. His processes were stuck in the same loops, catching on the same fallacies time and again. It was irrational. He knew that he was being difficult, so much more difficult than was necessary. Knew that he was being a burden on his human, who was already sick and under so much stress as things stood--

Within moments Ted had pushed himself up to stand, walking over to Harkness and cupping his face with cool hands. "Hey, no, shhhhshshhh it's okay," the small human murmured, kissing his forehead. Stroking his face with a careful tenderness that caught in his throat. "It's okay babe, I gotcha."

That-- that _kindness_. That empathy for a machine - a synth - was too much. Harkness let his head fall against Ted's neck, bringing his arms around his human as he fought to remember how to breathe at regular intervals without choking on air. "I'm scared," he said, little more than a whisper.

"I know, Harkness, I know," Ted soothed. Harkness clung even tighter when the human started petting his hair. "I'm right here, baby, it's okay. You've got every right to be scared."

No, he didn't. But how could he explain that to Ted? That his fear wasn't rational or even something he could easily explain-- that he was stuck in a spiral of contradictions that only seemed to get worse with every rotation? It was entirely possible that what he was experiencing was just unique to androids such as himself, or even a malfunction that was unique to him alone. That he really was afraid for _no reason_ , because he really was broken somehow.

"Hey, c'mon." Ted's voice was as soft and reassuring as Harkness had ever heard it, inches from his ear. "This is your show, okay? I'm not gonna do anything you're not up for. If you wanna stop, just say so."

"No," Harkness said. He inhaled deeply to steady himself and let it out nice and slow, the smell of aftershave and sweat lingering in his nose. Gradually, his grip loosened. "I need to do this, it's just--"

Ted shook his head. "Not 'need', babe. 'Want' is the word I'm looking at. What is it that you want to do?"

"I _want_ to be done with this." Pulling away enough to get a good look at his human, Harkness felt the fear give way briefly to exasperation at Ted's insistence on talking. He wasn't any good at talking. "Ted, I'm scared. I wasn't made to handle being scared."

"You were made to be scary?" Ted suggested with a wry smirk.

Harkness gave an annoyed little huff. Annoyed at himself, mostly. "You're not that far off."

"I know." The statement shocked Harkness into silence. Did he? How? It hadn't been on any of the holotapes on his computer-- "So what do you wanna do about that?"

"About-- about what? About being made to be scary?"

"No, that part's okay." Harkness felt Ted's fingers in his hair again as the human spoke, and there was an undeniable fondness to the Vaultie's tone that perplexed him. Did Ted like that he was frightening or something? "What we need to do is fix the scary parts so that you're either not afraid of them anymore. Or just somehow make it so that they're not a thing."

"Not a thing...?" Human phrasing still lost him sometimes.

"Yeah. Like, eliminate whatever it is that scares you entirely so you don't have to experience it, but without turning you off or--"

The answer came to him immediately after that. "Why not turn me off?"

Ted blinked for several seconds. "I--well, I figured you wouldn't like that, Hark."

"I don't," Harkness agreed. Emphatically so. Yet even with that being the case he realized with startling clarity that it didn't scare him. Not like being invaded did. "Would it work?"

"It's possible? But I mean, babe--" Small hands went to cup Harkness's face again, pulling his gaze upwards. Concern and doubt were etched into his human's features. "What if you don't wake up? This'd be like, I dunno. Like going under the knife, y'know? I might not be able to bring you back up again once I shut you down. Especially if I'm gonna be messing around in your system."

There. Ted was scared too. Harkness could hear it in his human's voice, lacing the words with a greater meaning. Absurd as it was, knowing that he wasn't alone in his fear turned out to be the greatest comfort thus far; that, and knowing that Ted's fear was something he could handle much better than his own.

He wasn't shaking nearly as much as he had been before when he took one of Ted's hands into his own, tugging it forward and pressing his lips to the pink skin of his human's palm. If he concentrated, he could feel Ted's pulse under his fingertips and track the beat of a badly malfunctioning heart. A heart that held too much kindness for its own good, if human literature were to be believed on the subject of hearts and feelings.

"I trust you," he said. "You wouldn't let that happen, would you?"

Ted shifted his hand so that he could curl his fingers around Harkness's own. "I might not be able to stop it, Harkness. If something I did caused a compatibility issue, or there was some failsafe to prevent--"

"No." Another kiss, this time against the backs of knuckles that were swollen from poor circulation. "I know you. You'd do everything in your power to make it work."

His human bit his lip, gripping Harkness's hand that much tighter. "Babe... I don't wanna risk losing you."

Harkness had to shove aside the thought that Ted's statement sounded eerily close to his own from not too long ago. "Please," he said. He trusted his human to fix him, he just didn't trust himself to be awake for it. Because Ted was good - strong enough to do things right in spite of being scared - maybe even good enough to make up for all the ways Harkness wasn't.

For a fraction of a second, Ted looked like he was about to cry. But the look passed before Harkness even had time to doubt. "I-- okay." Sucking in a sharp breath, Ted nodded slowly. "Okay. But if anything goes wrong I'm going to undo whatever I've done, unplug you, and turn you back on. Sound fair?"

"Sounds fair," Harkness agreed, relaxing back into the chair. It would work, he told himself. He kept telling himself that right up to the instant that he powered down.

But in those last scant few nanoseconds, he couldn't pretend that he wasn't scared.

\---

Harkness jerked "awake" with a gasp, bolting upright in the chair. His system was instantly on high alert, wary of the gap in his awareness; to him, the transition felt instantaneous. Yet there was a sluggishness in his limbs like he had been asleep, and his mouth and throat felt dry.

One hour. Seven minutes. Eighteen seconds. Two hundred and seven milliseco--

"Hey," a voice said. Ted's voice. He relaxed at the sound. "Morning, sleeping beauty."

"It's not morning," Harkness corrected, easing back into the chair. The connection was still active. He reached back and unplugged himself with a slight wince while his system complained that he hadn't followed the proper procedures before unhooking it. "Did it work?"

"Should've." A few moments passed before he realized that several of the lights had been turned on, and Ted was eyeing him curiously. It looked for all the world like the small human was trying very hard not to smile as he sat cross-legged on the floor in front of the terminal. In front of Harkness. "You tell me. It's your head."

Oh. Right. He should-- he could poke at his own settings, maybe? Unsure, Harkness closed his eyes and focused on what a human might call his heads-up display; it wasn't quite an overlay so much as it was a constant background process layering a machine's interpretation on top of what could be called his major senses. His calculations, his statistics, his data storage and access and everything he did went through that interface.

Then he pulled out the same task menu that allowed him what little freedom he had to run diagnostics and defragment his drive. From there he went into the section that showed him which processes were eating the most memory at any given moment. Nothing had stopped him yet. No errors or warnings nagged at his awareness.

On a whim, he found the option to end the most taxing process his system was currently running and did so. And for just a moment, he forgot how to breathe. " _Oh_."

"Harkness?" Ted was smiling, and Harkness had _no idea_ what the hexidecimal color of his eyes was. "You okay babe?"

"I--" He had no idea what to say. He had turned off his interface and all the help he'd had was just. Gone. It was almost enough for him to fly into a panic. Almost, but not quite. Because _shit_ , he had just changed something in his own system. He had full control. Screwing his eyes shut again, he fished around in his commands until he found that task menu. "--I. I need a minute."

The way Ted laughed then was indescribable, and not entirely because Harkness lacked access to his extended dictionary in the few moments that it lasted. Well, all right. Mostly because of that. "Take as much time as you need, Harkness," Ted told him. "If you need me, I'll be upstairs."

By the time Harkness got himself back in order and had re-established the process he'd accidentally closed, the human had already wandered off. But that was fine. Harkness didn't lack for things to do.

About time he learned how to do his own maintenance.

\---

The first thing Harkness had needed to learn as he was switching between a command prompt, his interface, and the task menu from before was that his code was very complicated and probably shouldn't be messed with too much on the assumption that a given process looked useless. The translation software, for instance, also doubled as parsing software for the more difficult bits of the English language; only a few seconds passed before he'd turned it back on out of frustration due to not being able to understand just a handful of logged conversations.

The second thing he'd found was that Ted had unearthed something in his code that even he hadn't known about. And once he'd put together what it was for, he was out of the chair and up the stairs as quickly as his legs would carry him.

Without a second's thought, he burst through the door to Ted's room. "You put in a system restore?"

Ted blinked up at him from a nest of teddy bears and pillows on an old, creaky mattress. The Vaultie had a book in his hands and a patched blanket pulled up to his waist. "Uh. Hi?"

"A system restore," Harkness repeated. "With a code to trigger it. You did that?"

"Well, yeah?" Still a bit startled, Ted shifted to sit up straighter on the bed and set the book down on top of his filing cabinet. "Gotta have some safeguards. I mean, doesn't matter how careful we are, there's still a risk that somebody could hack you if they tried hard enough. So it sets up restore points to load from whenever you want, and anyone who knows the code can get you back to being your grumpy-ass self without too much of a fuss."

A moment passed, and Harkness became aware of the sound of distinctly unfamiliar laughter echoing faintly within the sheet-metal walls of the room. Then he realized with a start that it was unfamiliar because it was his own. Shit. It was such a rare thing that he hadn't recognized the sound of it.

Ted was out of bed immediately, bare feet loud against the cold wooden floor. He wasn't wearing much; he had to be cold. "Harkness? Seriously, you okay? You're scaring me a little, babe."

Right. He-- he probably sounded hysterical. Maybe he was. His eyes burned, and his chest ached with something he couldn't describe. "I don't know," he said. But he was smiling. Smiling so much it hurt. Like his face wasn't used to it; like it was a sort of flexibility that he hadn't been made for.

"You kinda look like you're gonna cry," Ted remarked, sounding amused. "You're not gonna cry on me, are you? Not saying you can't, just. Fair warning? I'm not good with crying."

Harkness laughed again, shaking his head. "You're such a nuisance," he said.

"Damn right." Leaning an elbow against the wall, Ted smirked up at him. "I'm a public menace, I tell ya. Up past curfew and everything. Gonna arrest me, officer?"

"I'm not an officer anymore," Harkness replied, caught between being entertained by the absurdity of it and just being confused. What an odd thing to say. "Was all the shit you pulled back in Rivet City just because you wanted to get arrested?"

"No, I pulled that shit back in Rivet City because I was bored, generally." Ted cocked his head to the side and let out an overly melodramatic sigh. "Anyone ever tell you that you're really bad at this flirting thing?"

Wait-- oh. "Was that what you were doing?"

Ted stuck his tongue out and blew a raspberry. "Pthbbbt. Just a bit. You seemed so happy for a second there that I couldn't help myself. I'm serious, you are _really_ fucking cute when you laugh like that, it's just too adorable for words--"

Two things quickly became obvious to Harkness: one, that Ted was doing his nervous babbling thing, and two, that Ted had gotten the impression that Harkness didn't fully approve of said flirting. So Harkness decided that the best way to put the matter to rest would be to _show_ rather than tell, because he still wasn't all that good at telling and he felt like if he didn't do something he was going to burst somehow.

Once, Ted had given Harkness permission to pin him to a locker anytime it was deemed agreeable. Harkness assumed, as he caught Ted's jaw in his hand and bent to capture his human's mouth with his own, that a wall was an acceptable substitute.

Ted's delighted gasp as his back hit the corrugated steel behind him told Harkness that he wasn't wrong.

 


	25. 22: bless

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Everything falls into place.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I tried to make them smut, I REALLY FUCKING DID. WHY WON'T THEY SMUT. HARKNESS YOU STUBBORN ASS.
> 
> Fucking brats I swear. (jk I love them.)

"Okay, okay. Just-- just a sec, babe," Ted stammered out, planting his hands on Harkness's shoulders and pushing him back a few inches. "Gotta stop for a minute, just..."

Harkness blinked as he was forced to part from his human, easing his grip somewhat on the pair of legs wound snugly around his waist. Ted was flushed and breathing hard in his arms, caught between Harkness and the wall; meanwhile, Harkness also noted distantly that his lips felt swollen after several minutes of very emphatically showing Ted just how much he was appreciated. "What's wrong?"

"Hah!" Thin arms slipped around Harkness's neck so that Ted could pull himself in close for a quick peck at the corner of the android's lips in between breaths. "Nothin'," he assured. "Just lightheaded, that's all."

Brow furrowing, Harkness shifted his own weight so that his human's was better supported. "Why would you be lightheaded?"

Ted shrugged. "No meds, hot robot grinding me into a wall. Ever mixed bad circulation and an erection?"

"I-- oh." Harkness felt as if his face was overheating as he realized belatedly that yes, there was something hard jutting against his hip. Right. So symptoms of arousal weren't quite as acceptable when his human wasn't medicated.

"Yeah, 'oh' is right." Well, at least Ted seemed amused rather than annoyed; smiling crookedly, he gently patted Harkness on the cheek. "C'mon, back up a bit so I can go siddown," he said, and Harkness did just that.

A few minutes. Just a few minutes of kissing - complete with the improved logistics and positioning that came with picking the human up rather than bending to accomondate the height difference - and Ted was winded. Thinking back on previous conversations, Harkness had to marvel at how Ted had only mentioned having one close call (implying a brush with death, knowing Ted's tendency to downplay things occasionally) under the circumstances. It was either caution or luck, and Harkness wasn't sure he believed in luck.

He watched closely as the human dropped back onto to his own two feet and made his way to the bed, never going unsupported for more than a fraction of a second as his hands always had a grip on _something_. That something could be the wall, or the headboard, or the edge of the mattress, but it was always something. It was like Ted knew better than to trust his own legs to work right.

Definitely caution, then.

"Gonna just stand there looking imposing?" Ted asked as he finally eased himself down, looking up at Harkness with a wry smirk.

Harkness frowned. Wait, he said he was lightheaded. Did that prevent him from being affectionate or not? "If you being aroused is a problem, I'm not sure my proximity is all that advisable," Harkness said.

"So long as I'm sitting down, it should be okay. Well, sitting down or laying down." Ted patted the bed next to himself. "C'mon. At least sit with me, alright? Don't have to do anything beyond that."

Sitting. Right. That was probably fine, wasn't it? After several seconds Harkness decided there was no harm in doing as Ted asked, and sat down stiffly next to his human with a certain awkwardness as the bedframe creaked underneath their combined weight. It wasn't a particularly comfortable bed, he realized; the mattress was uneven to the point of being lumpy in places, the lack of pillows had been compensated for with teddy bears, and in the place of a comforter and sheets there were something like four throw-blankets.

But it was a bed - a real bed, with a real twin mattress and a real frame - and that was already a significant step up from what most wastelanders had. Better than the cots in the Rivet City common room. Certainly better than the cramped bunks that most of the security force slept on. It was just the beds at the Weatherly that were a step up from the norm, and on reflection Harkness had to wonder whether spending a few nights there had managed to spoil him.

Then Ted sighed and leaned against him, head on his shoulder, and he couldn't bring himself to be disappointed.

"Thanks," Ted murmured, offering a tired smile; not that Harkness understood what he was being thanked for. "I was worried for a minute. Thought I might've scared you off."

"Can't see why you'd think that," Harkness said honestly.

Whatever Ted was thinking, it made him cringe visibly. "You get skittish whenever sex comes up," he said. Then he added quickly, "--not that I'm gonna, y'know. Speculate as to why. I get if you wanna keep things to yourself."

Oh. Harkness let out a slow breath, only realizing how hard he must be frowning when he could feel a faint ache in the associated muscles of his face. Skittish. That was one word that could apply to his attitude, he supposed. It wasn't quite fear or disgust. He just didn't see it as something necessary or even especially positive. But for Ted... "Is that something you'd want?" he asked.

Ted opened his mouth like he was about to reply; to Harkness it seemed like he was about to deny it, or maybe say something that absolved Harkness of any responsibility. Not only would it be a Ted thing to do, but it would fit the pattern that had been established so far.

Yet for some reason, Ted stopped himself before he could begin. No apology came, no swift deflection, not even an outright refusal. Instead he seemed... Hurt? No, that wasn't quite right. Bitter-- yes, bitter. That was a good way to define it. His hands were bunched into fists in his lap and he looked like he wanted to punch something that wasn't in the room to be punched, the muscles in his jaw having gone taut.

"Sorry," he said eventually. "This is a conversation that needs to happen, just... Every time we get close? It just makes me want to march right up to Boston and-- I dunno. Start knocking some heads together over at the Institute, I guess."

That left Harkness speechless. What? Ted would fight the Institute? Did-- did he intend to do so on his own? How did he plan on getting in? Harkness couldn't even get him in, not without taking out a fellow Courser. And even for Ted, who was impossible and clever and so many things that Coursers weren't, it would be damn near suicidal to take one on just for the sake of getting into the Institute. And then even when he did get in he'd be cut down on the spot--

"I'm not saying I would," Ted added, "I'm saying you kinda make me want to sometimes."

"Why?" The word left Harkness's mouth before he could stop himself.

"Because I can't do a damn thing to keep you safe from shit that's already fucking _happened_ ," came the reply. "And every time you're scared, every time something makes you skittish - hell, even every time you're happy over something that's fucking simple to anyone else - it makes me think of another positive thing that those bastards ruined for you, or another basic fucking right that they kept from you."

Harkness could only stare as Ted let out an irritated sigh, the human bringing a hand up to the center of his own chest and massaging it with a deep frown. Visibly trying to calm himself with deep breaths and closed eyes, like he was going through some sort of breathing exercise.

"So... That's what I mean when I say I won't force you to do anything that makes you feel uncomfortable." Ted only glanced up briefly as he spoke, looking almost guilty. "Don't think I could forgive myself if I hurt you, yknow... Like that. And I apologize if I've brought up any bad memories for you."

For well over a minute, there was nothing but silence between them. Silence and the sound of their breathing, accompanied by the dim background noise from outside the house. Megaton was asleep, but its generators and water purifiers weren't. In that, Harkness supposed it wasn't so different from Rivet City. It was smaller and felt more like it was being held together with duct tape and wonderglue, but it was just as alive.

It was also much easier to contemplate their surroundings than it would be to try actually processing the enormity of what Ted had just told him. Because even admitting that no one had ever said that sort of thing to him before would just drive home the point further; he had no idea what to say. No idea what to feel.

Except for one tiny detail. One he was so sure of that it hurt to think about. "Others had it worse," he said. "I was a-- I'd bring them back, when they ran. As long as I stayed in line, didn't malfunction, and avoided being damaged too badly, I was safe. Other synths? They were never safe."

"An obedient slave is still a slave, babe," Ted told him gently.

"I know. But I was still lucky." Still a monster, at least in the eyes of anyone who knew what a Courser was. Still not nearly good enough in any respect at all to do as much for Ted as his broken little human had done for him. "There's a lot less in the way of bad things for me to be reminded of than there could be, so..."

He trailed off, unsure of what else he could say. He wanted to tell Ted not to worry, not to be so concerned, but at the same time he really appreciated having someone who cared enough to be concerned to begin with. Yet basking in it felt like selfishness incarnate. He didn't deserve to have someone take his well-being into account at every turn like that, especially someone who had every right to look out only for themselves.

And then Ted surprised him again by flopping back and shifting so that he was laying down properly on the bed, rolling onto his side and patting the mattress again.

"C'mere."

Harkness blinked. "There's no room."

"There's plenty," Ted insisted. "Curl up right here next to me. I'm sure your legs will fit. C'mon."

Some deeply buried bit of programming resisted the thought of having his back to anyone through the whole night - even Ted - but he managed to quiet it by reminding himself firmly that he would at least be facing the door. So if anything happened, he could react. Right. That was... acceptable. Okay. But what he didn't anticipate was just how warm and intimate it was to have Ted pressed against him when he finally settled in, a weirdly perfect fit against the curve of his back, with hot breath on his neck as his human shifted to throw the blankets over them.

"There," Ted whispered, so close to his ear that he shivered. "Too fuckin' tired to have the patience to argue with you about how good you are, babe, sorry. Will cuddles work?"

If by working, Ted meant that it would make Harkness want to sink back into that warmth and never leave it...? "I think so," Harkness replied, uncertain.

"Good." With that, Ted nuzzled the back of his neck before pressing a kiss to it. "For the record, in case I didn't make it clear? I've thought you were amazing since I heard your first holotape. So." The next bit was muffled as Ted fought back a yawn. "Don't beat yourself up, a'ight?"

Harkness didn't know why, but he could definitely feel his eyes burning with that inexplicable wetness again.

\---

The next couple of days were uneventful. Harkness had full access to Ted's computer still if he wanted it - full access to everything in the house, really - but since Ted wasn't able to do anything especially taxing, it meant a whole lot of staying at home and doing relatively little. Which, for Harkness at least, led to spending a lot of time with his own thoughts and with himself.

And that was fine, really. He needed time to go over his code more thoroughly anyway.

Thus many hours were spent in his chair or in Ted's slightly too-small bed, eyes closed as he quietly reorganized shortcuts and did what Ted jokingly described as the robot equivalent of a spring clean. Figuring out what his limitations were. Clearing out the clutter in his processes, streamlining things anywhere he could. Why do something in twelve lines when it could easily be written to work just as effectively and thoroughly with seven? He could only guess that it was a human thing.

It also occurred to him that humans probably kept him from editing himself because they thought he'd edit on the fly and break himself, and not take the much smarter route of creating a seperate partition in which to copy over, rewrite, and test the code first before implementing it. Which... All right, he had done that at first, but it had been minor enough that he'd fixed it with Ted's system restore the moment he'd realized his mistake and he'd learned never to do it again as a result, so he still thought it was kind of silly.

What wasn't silly though? His system's history of patches and file edits.

It was on a whim at first; he wanted to narrow down the bit of code that caused his anxiety. He wanted to know how to fix it so that it wouldn't have a chance to lock him up or cause latency issues. If he could narrow down the patch that may have caused such a bug to occur, then he might be able to fix it.

Except it wasn't a bug. It was built into one of his earliest software patches from back when he was fresh off the production line. He was afraid because the Institute wanted him to be. Being anxious about any kind of behavior that could be seen as deviant, and the fear that came along with continuing those behaviors anyway, were integral to his programming.

A synth who was frightened of consequence was an obedient synth. A synth who was scared of being the next target would preemptively come into the SRB for reconditioning when malfunctions popped up. A synth who didn't want to be caught would tell a Courser what their fellow synths were doing. The Institute liked it that way; it gave them control.

It also meant that he couldn't fix it without breaking himself. Even the Railroad wouldn't be able to fix it; thinking back, he wondered if that was the real reason why they overrode the escaped synths' personalities and minds with a new "human" program. Harkness had thought that the point of it was safety and anonymity, but that wasn't it at all, was it? If safety and anonymity was all a synth wanted, they just needed to keep running and never look back. Being rewritten didn't even really help that, because it left the synth in question blind to the dangers they'd face if caught.

Peace of mind, though? A healthy, fresh start with a blank slate? No preprogrammed tendencies towards what humans would probably call mental illness, because that partition was either wiped or blocked off completely? He could see the appeal, even if he'd come to prefer being himself over playing at being human.

But even though he was angry at the Institute for making him wrong on purpose, that anger didn't last. It couldn't. He'd beaten them at their own game. Found his peace in spite of them.

There was safety - real safety - in knowing what might come for him. In having Ted with him to face it when it did. And while having that safety didn't necessarily "cure" him, it did help. Like safety and security had been their own kind of bug fix. Like Ted could patch his problems as they came up. Maybe that had been all he needed-- something tangible, something real standing between him and his fears.

When he joined Ted in bed that night (which seemed to have become a new habit between the two of them, along with innocently affectionate touches and kisses that tasted like nuka cola and snack cakes), he did so feeling that he could take on any obstacle the world had to throw at them. Knowing how and why he was broken meant that he knew how to keep it from ruling over him. It meant that the Institute couldn't have even that tiny victory against him.

He was free.

\---

Day three saw Ted getting bored of being stuck in Megaton. Harkness didn't realize just how bored, however, until the acrid smell of polyurethane reached his nose.

He was in his chair at the time, having moved it back to the corner where it had previously been situated; he liked having his back to a wall, liked having a clear view of the door. Liked the darkness that corner had to offer, as much a comfort to him as wearing a stealth boy. The teddy bears had remained in it, Harkness having gotten used to them popping up like weeds around the house when he wasn't looking.

Ted had mentioned that he wanted to work on his power armor. It needed to be up to the task of fighting the Enclave, he'd said. Harkness couldn't exactly disagree when he knew all too well how much Ted would wince still when the plasma burns on his shoulder weren't treated gently enough.

But that smell? That smell couldn't be good. The chemicals his system could recognize as being in the air were harmful, caustic things. Synthetic compounds that couldn't be good for a sick human.

Just what the hell was Ted doing up there? Frowning to himself, Harkness got up from his chair and set off to find out. And when he got to the room, there was Ted. Kneeled on the floor in front of his power armor suit with an old paintbrush in his hand and a bucket on the floor. Not wearing gloves. Not wearing a mask. Just the vault suit and a pair of ragged old Red Rocket shoes with frayed laces.

Harkness only frowned harder at the visual. "What are you doing?"

The Vaultie's head turned, slightly bloodshot colorless eyes blinking up at him. "Fiberglass?" Ted replied, as if it were obvious. The skin on his hands was quite clearly irritated by the chemicals.

"And you're not taking any precautions at all?"

"Do I even need to?" Ted asked. "I mean yeah, it itches, but it's not that bad."

"It can't be good for you," Harkness said. And the smell was-- _foul_. Not that Harkness was usually one to complain, but it really was awful. Made the inside of his nose all... Prickly. In a way it was almost akin to the feeling of breathing in subzero temperatures that he'd become familiar with during some of the more brutal Boston winter weather he'd experienced, with the addition of smelling a bit like burning plastic.

But Ted just rolled his eyes. "Look, I have to take it easy until Moira's done, right? So I'm taking it easy." He gestured to the power armor with the hand holding the paintbrush; the movement sent a few flecks of wet whatever-it-was flying, and Harkness took a step back. "This is easy. See? I'm being good, here."

Was that even a valid point? Harkness had to wonder. "At least wear a mask," he insisted.

He was dismissed with a shrug. "Don't have one."

How could Ted not have a mask of some sort for dealing with chemicals? Sighing, Harkness leaned against the doorframe and frowned down at his human sternly. "If I get you one, will you wear it?"

"Uh... Sure?" Ted looked confused. "Don't need it though."

"Gloves too."

"I guess."

Good enough for Harkness. "I'll be back in a few minutes," he promised, and then he was down the stairs and out the door before his human could protest.

Moira Brown had to have something of that nature, didn't she? She did repairs on things, so she had to know what sort of gear would be appropriate for working with fiberglass (because Harkness sure as hell didn't know the specifics).

The trip to Craterside Supply didn't take long; Harkness wasn't capable of getting lost if he knew where something was already. He wondered briefly whether or not he should knock on the door, but since Ted hadn't done so on their last visit he pushed aside the thought and simply walked right in.

It surprised him a bit that the main room out front was empty. "Miss Brown?" he inquired of the large, echoing space.

"Coming!" she called back from somewhere up above him. Right. She was upstairs.

When she popped into view, accompanied by the loud and distinctive sound of heavy boots on metal, Harkness was relieved to see that she was wearing goggles and gloves herself along with the utility jumpsuit and the bandana that held back her hair. Good. Maybe she'd have extras. "Sorry to bother you," he said as she reached the bottom of the stairs.

She huffed at him as she approached. "Oh, shush. You're not bothering me a bit." She pulled her goggles away from her eyes to reposition them on her forehead. "What d'you need?"

Straight to the point then. "Do you have any equipment that would be good for work involving fiberglass?"

"Sure, I've got plenty." She smiled up at him easily. "Latex allergy or no?"

"I... No?" Harkness furrowed his brow. "I don't know. It's for Ted."

"Oh, for Teddy! Why didn't you say so?" Not a moment later she was in motion, ducking behind the counter and out of view to rustle around in what Harkness assumed to be various toolboxes. "That'll be treated leather gloves, plastic goggles, annnnd... actually I don't know if I have a spare fan or air filtration unit that I haven't taken apart. I might have a simple cloth mask or two though, that should work."

"You're the expert," Harkness conceded.

"Are you going to be helping him?" she asked, her head briefly poking out above the counter.

"No."

"All right." And back behind the counter again. "Would you like a mask anyway? Fiberglass can get really smelly."

Harkness didn't need one, but she wasn't wrong about the smell in the slightest. "If it's not too much trouble," he said.

"Just tell Teddy he owes me ten caps for it the next time he comes in." Eventually Moira came back up again with her arms full of gear; gloves, a couple of masks, and goggles. "And if you get any on your skin, use this," she added, plucking out a bottle from a shelf behind her. "Hypo-allergenic lotion. It should work for both of you."

Picking up the bottle hesitantly, Harkness unscrewed the cap and sniffed it. His nose scrunched out of some programmed reflex. "Doesn't smell hypo-allergenic."

"That's because it doesn't have anything in it to make it smell pretty, silly," Moira said. "Oh, and tell Teddy that his medicine should be ready by tomorrow. I had some trouble getting a couple of the things I needed for it, but now that I've got them it shouldn't take long. But don't tell him I had trouble getting anything, okay? He doesn't need to be upset right now."

Yeah, Harkness knew all about that. "Thanks, miss Brown."

"No need to thank me. It's good to see someone looking out for him." She practically beamed at him. "Remember: ten caps."

"Yes, ma'am."


	26. 23: moon

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Compromises are reached. New things are tried.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> HOOOBOY WE GOT SOME FUN TIMES HERE
> 
> harkness you're so fucking stubborn i stg
> 
> **THIS IS THE CHAPTER WITH (fairly tame) SMUT IN IT, IN CASE ANYONE WAS DEAD SET ON THAT**

Ted's hands were even more red and swollen when Harkness got back than they'd been when he'd left; Harkness found his human at the sink in the bathroom, somewhere between trying to scrub the residue off and scratching at the obviously lingering itch. Patches of his face were blotchy as well, leading Harkness to believe that Ted had probably rubbed at his nose a time or two while working and ended up spreading the irritation further.

"Finally," Ted grumbled when told that his medication would be ready soon. Harkness was thankful for it too; the sooner Ted's boredom could be alleviated, the better. His human didn't need more reasons to make the house smell like worse things than polyurethane.

Dinner was at Moriarty's that night. For all the place's faults (most of which could be attributed to the owner), the bartender was a damn good cook when given half a chance. It had taken some convincing for Harkness to actually try the food, but Gob's mutfruit-and-syrup-topped fluffy bread thing was surprisingly good, especially so with butter. Rivet City hadn't had anything like it. Clearly they needed to let more ghouls on board to remedy that.

"Carol calls it 'french toast'," Gob rasped, smiling as brightly as his yellowed teeth would allow. "She says it was better in the old days when there were strawberries to top it with."

"Carol?" Harkness repeated.

"His mom," Ted informed him. "Back in Underworld. You'd like her."

Gob ducked his head with embarrassment, what few sparse hairs were left on his head falling in front of his face. "She's not really my mother," he mumbled.

"Tell her that." Then Ted took advantage of Harkness's distraction to steal a massive forkful of fluffy toast right off of his plate, and Harkness was so offended by the loss that he stole it right back before it could make it to his human's mouth, plucking the fork from Ted's fingers. Because it was good food, and Ted didn't get to steal things that Harkness was actually enjoying.

If he hadn't left, Harkness wouldn't be enjoying much of anything. He wouldn't be prompted to frown when Nova's manicured fingertips traced Ted's shoulders in passing, he wouldn't be eating just because he liked what was on his plate, he wouldn't be thinking of asking if they could go to Underworld where this Carol person was when Ted was feeling a bit better so he could try her fluffy toast. Such things made him wonder just how small his life had been before. Made him realize just how much he'd missed out on-- how much all synths were missing out on.

Just like that, it hit him: the shape of that shapeless _want_ he'd felt. His burning curiosity, his formless desire. He wanted to experience things. He wanted to know things. That gap in his experience was its source. It had only been impossible to articulate because he lacked the knowledge needed to conceptualize it.

He disliked eating, but he'd do it for the sake of another helping of fluffy toast; he disliked a lot of the things that seemed inherent to humans, but Ted made it tolerable by being the best person he'd known while being human at the same time. Were there other things he'd been missing out on for similar reasons? Were there things he couldn't trust or think of as good things, simply because he lacked a positive experience to associate them with?

( _"And every time you're scared, every time something makes you skittish - hell, even every time you're happy over something that's fucking simple to anyone else - it makes me think of another positive thing that those bastards ruined for you, or another basic fucking right that they kept from you."_ )

Ted stole his portions because he'd shown that he was uncomfortable with eating just for the sake of looking human. Ted chastised people who made him nervous and always tried to find better options. Even backed off at the slightest hint that Harkness didn't want something. But sometimes-- sometimes--

Sometimes he had to steal his fork back, because Ted made assumptions. Sometimes Ted was too careful, keeping him from experiencing even the sorts of things that could be good and right and positive. Not out of malice or cruelty, but because the little human was so intent on keeping Harkness safe and happy and comfortable that it cut into everything else.

And maybe... Maybe some of the fault lay with Harkness as well. Because he hadn't actually indicated what he wanted, not clearly. How could he? He hadn't been able to articulate it properly, and so any discussion of it left Ted more convinced than ever that Harkness was uncomfortable. And while Harkness appreciated the respect, the care, the kindness with which he'd been treated so far, he always came out of those conversations with a vague feeling of dissatisfaction.

They left the tavern hand-in-hand after dinner, much like they usually did when there was no danger. The food had been fantastic, better still when washed down with a Quantum that Ted had talked him into. But as Ted made idle conversation on the way home about the stars and light pollution and the atmosphere having been thinned by nuclear war, Harkness found his thoughts lingering instead on that stolen bite of fluffy toast, and what such a simple thing might mean.

"Less atmosphere means that there's less insulation against both the cold vacuum of space and the nasty-ass hot whims of the sun, so we get hotter days and colder nights as a result," the small human was saying as they reached the door, gesturing with his hands as he spoke much like he always did when he went on tangents. "Places that got hit hard, or places that had thinned atmospheric layers to begin with, or places that are geographically wonky anyway? Those got it worse. At least that's what the pre-war books thought would happen. Haven't been anywhere but here myself, so I can't say--"

"Ted?" Harkness began, uncertainty in his voice.

Ted ground to a halt mid-sentence, blinking up at him. Concerned. "Yeah? What's up?"

"Can we talk?" It was such a simple thing. A small, plain statement. Harkness didn't know if it was the right thing to say, or if saying anything at all would be considered ungrateful in the face of so much kindness. But he had to articulate. Had to communicate. Otherwise everything he was feeling and thinking would sit inside him and slowly rot, the excess of sweetness turning sickly and foul.

Somehow, Ted understood. He must have. Because he looked as worried and nervous about the tiny statement as Harkness felt. "Okay," he said.

They went inside; the Handy greeted them, and Ted ordered it to take it easy for the rest of the night. Harkness closed the door behind them, nervous and relieved all at once.

\---

The last vestiges of twilight filtered through the gaps in the house's construction as Harkness settled down to sit on the edge of Ted's lumpy mattress, with the human sitting directly across from him in a squeaky office chair. For some reason, the distance had Harkness longing for contact, for the simple comfort of closeness. Yet he knew that if he gave in to that desire, he would sink into that comfort and never leave. Nothing would get said. Nothing would change. He had to communicate. Had to say something.

"What's wrong, babe?" Ted asked him gently as the silence dragged on. Kind and good as ever. Harkness winced at the sweetness of his human's tone, knowing full well that Ted never intended any harm and that he was probably just looking into things too deeply again. Being selfish in the face of kindness.

But he had to say something. Even if it was only for the sake of being proven wrong. "I'm not good with words," he started to say, "so you'll have to forgive me if this doesn't quite come out right."

"Okay."

"And I'm not-- angry. At all." Was that enough of a preface? "Or offended, or-- or anything like that."

Ted nodded slowly, and Harkness let himself relax somewhat in spite of feeling like what he'd said was inadequate. At least there didn't seem to be any offense or hurt so far on Ted's part. That meant it was enough, didn't it?

Harkness couldn't say for sure, but he couldn't let it stop him. He sucked in a breath before continuing, a vain attempt at calming his nerves. "So long as I've been with you, you've been nothing but good to me," he said. "It's honestly more than I deserve - no, I'm not going to let you fight me on that - and certainly more than anyone else has ever done. It's taken me some time to figure out what I should do about it, if anything, because it's just that novel of a concept to me.

"But earlier... Earlier, you took my food. It's a tiny thing. It shouldn't matter. You've done it before and I haven't stopped you; it usually means less for me to have to bother with. It's possible I'm reading too much into it, but I've gotten the impression on previous occasions that you do it because you know I don't like playing at being human if I don't have to. Except this time it wasn't something that bothered me. I was enjoying it. In this particular case it was a pleasant enough experience to not bother me. And it got me to think.

"I don't mean to imply that you should stop being... I don't know, thoughtful? Nice?" Articulation was difficult. "But there are good things in the world, things that I might like, that I just don't know about yet because I haven't had a chance to experience them. If you're protecting me from potential discomfort, how can I know what those things are like? How can I get better at self-determination if you're shielding me from ever needing to do so? I know you mean well, but--"

" _Harkness_ ," Ted cut in. "I get what you're saying, alright? No need to strain yourself."

Harkness took in another steadying breath, ducking his head. "Right," he said. "Sorry."

"Don't be, s'my fault." As much as Harkness wanted to argue that point, Ted didn't give him a chance to. "Just... What is it you want, babe? What do you want me to do?"

"I want--" Harkness began, but his voice caught on the word. He was new enough to wanting still that the sheer scope and enormity of what he wanted, now that he knew the shape of it well enough to put it into words, struck him like a blow. He must sound so selfish. So arrogant. Asking for Ted to go further out of his way was...

Several seconds passed in weighty silence before Ted sighed, shook his head, and carefully rolled his chair forward to close the distance between them, stopping just shy of the toes of Harkness's shoes. Then Harkness felt his processes stutter as Ted gently took his hands, brushing calloused thumbs over his knuckles. Treating him like he was delicate--

No. Treating him like he was _precious._ Something, someone worth caring for.

"Take your time, Harkness," Ted murmured, soothing him. Except he couldn't take his time. If he took any more time, his emotions would choke up his processes so badly that his system would lock up. Ted's kindness had that effect on him. He felt fragile, ready to break when he finally spoke up. Like a tap in just the wrong place would shatter him to pieces. Wanting opened him up to rejection and hurt.

But he had to give Ted the right to say _no_. "I want to give you as much as you've given me," he said. "I want to find as many things to enjoy about life and freedom as I can, I want to find as many reasons as possible to be hopeful instead of scared." His voice caught, but he forced himself to keep going. "I want to-- to overwrite the things that hurt with better things that don't. I can't erase them, but I can find better experiences to link those thoughts with and rework their definitions." He could manage that much, couldn't he? If he were careful?

Ted regarded him for some time; Harkness couldn't begin to guess at the thoughts going through his human's head. "And you'd want me to be the one to help you find all that?" he asked after a while, bringing one of Harkness's hands up to kiss it.

"Please," Harkness whispered.

"Then that's what we'll do."

\---

It was so simple after that.

Harkness had no doubt that Ted was the one in control. The little human first directed him to stand - mostly to make room to lay down - then tugged him onto the bed so abruptly that it was all he could do to not to crush his Vaultie on the way down with his weight, planting both hands in the mattress to hold himself up. This, apparently, was what Ted wanted; next he was being urged into position by small hands at his hips, a satisfied mumble of _there we go_ reaching his ears.

It took him a moment to realize that their respective positions left Ted pinned to the bed; once he did, he felt a subtle heat creeping into his face. "You'll get aroused like this," he said.

"No shit," Ted replied. He was smiling. "That's why I'm laying down."

Right. If Ted got lightheaded, at least he wasn't going to fall. Still, though. "What about your heartrate?"

"That'd really only be an issue if I intended to try getting off on this." With that, Harkness found himself being tugged down for a kiss.

It was slow. Unhurried. Harkness closed his eyes and leaned into it as slim fingers toyed with the hairs on the back of his neck, while Ted's other hand traced the lines of his torso through his shirt. The feather-light touch was like a significantly less heated version of the groping and fondling that had occurred the first time they'd done this. Not that Harkness minded in the slightest, considering how he'd left that encounter feeling more than a little uncomfortable.

Just as those fingers reached the hem of his shirt, however, they paused. Ted drew away just enough to look at him, yet remained near enough for the lingering smell of aftershave, sweat, and polyurethane to register to Harkness's senses. "Tell me if you need to stop, alright?" he said. "This's supposed to be a good thing, and I'm gonna keep it vanilla as fuck for you, but I also need you to let me know if I do anything you don't like."

"Vanilla?" Harkness repeated, confused.

"Simple. Plain. Nothing that requires any prep beforehand or forethought." Ted offered him a crooked grin. "I've done my homework, babe. This whole intimacy thing gets kinda complicated."

"Oh." Harkness shifted his weight nervously. Right. This was the simplest good thing that Ted could show him, wasn't it? Something he could have without much effort, without Ted having to be on his meds. That was... That was fine.

As if he could read the tension as it was creeping in, Ted smiled and shifted the hand at Harkness's neck to cup his jaw, stroking a thumb over end-of-the-day stubble. "Relax, okay?"

Easier said than done, but Harkness would try. "Okay."

His shirt came off first. Or rather, he pulled it off after Ted implied that it needed to go by tugging it up to somewhere around his ribs. He didn't know why it was necessary; maybe Ted was worried that he'd overheat? The only thing that really needed to be exposed for the sake of physical intimacy was-- _oh_. Oh. Right, Ted just wanted to grope him again. Perfectly reasonable. Well, maybe not reasonable, but what use was there for reason when blunt nails were raking over his ribs with just enough force to seemingly pull the air out of his lungs?

None. None whatsoever. His thoughts were growing much too frayed and fragmented for it. He didn't even realize that his eyes had drifted shut again until he was having to open them, and something like that should have alarmed him under any other circumstances. He was reacting to stimuli before he could fully process them. Arching into Ted's hands as they wandered over his skin. The one that had previously held his jaw had slid downward, fondling and squeezing his pectoral muscles like they were something to be admired; the other snuck down further still, fingers tracing the fine hairs on his lower abdomen.

Before, Ted had never dared to venture farther than that. Something had always stopped him. Even with permission he hesitated, undoing the fastenings of Harkness's khakis with such care that it put that much more emphasis on every accidental brush against him through the fabric; the zipper alone was downright torturous, his breath hitching in his chest.

Then cool fingers slipped beneath the waistband of his underwear, and for several seconds he couldn't think at all. He could only _feel_ , lost for words in the way Ted's hand wrapped around him and stripped him of his coherency. Overwhelmed his processors almost to the point of locking up. It took him a few moments to rebalance himself; by the time he had, his arms had buckled and he was only barely holding himself up on his elbows, face pressed to the crook of his human's neck.

"Good?" Ted asked him. There was a smile implied in the human's voice that made Harkness huff with exasperation.

"What do you think?" he managed.

Ted just laughed and kept right on stroking him with just the right amount of pressure, squeezing on the way back up in a way that left him breathless. Either Ted had done this before with someone else, or the Vaultie spent way too much time masturbating. Harkness suspected the latter, honestly. "Dunno," Ted mused. "You're still pretty tense. I mean, your dick says yes, but dicks are stupidly easy to convince."

Harkness got a chuckle out of that, even if it trailed into a groan near the end. Fuck, he wasn't even sure if humor was appropriate. "I-- it's different," he admitted; Ted slowed the pace a bit as if to give him room to think. "Wildly different. From the implanted memories, I mean."

"Not in a bad way, I hope."

"No, more like--" Harkness sighed in frustration. "You're not helping."

He could _hear_ Ted's grin. "Want me to stop?"

No. He didn't. He could do with a little less smugness though. "You're an ass sometimes."

"Yeah, sorry 'bout that." Ted didn't sound sorry. Unless the way he picked up the pace again was meant as an apology. Harkness shuddered and rocked into Ted's hand out of some preprogrammed instinct. "Good though, right?"

"Intense." Harkness forced himself to make some kind of sense even if doing so lagged his system that much more, gripping the mattress so tightly he could hear seams giving way. "It's like a-- a sensory overload. Almost worried that I might lock up."

Ted hummed thoughtfully, pausing just long enough to shift his grip; the next few strokes had Harkness squeezing his eyes shut as his vision artifacted. _Fuck_. "Probably normal," the human said. "It's simulating something like an orgasm without any of the chemical or hormonal responses to back it up, right? I mean, it's a lazy way of going about it but it works."

Harkness wouldn't know. He hadn't been the one to write his own code. He only knew how he felt: overheated, overstimulated, helpless. He knew he had to be close to some kind of release, the building pressure leaving him lightheaded and gasping. But it felt _good_ , too, sending intense sparks of sensation through him that were enough make him shiver involuntarily.

A part of him didn't want it to end. With anyone but Ted, he'd be terrified of a thought like that.

"Ted, please..." he begged. Wasn't sure what for.

His human chuckled softly in his ear. "Go ahead, babe."

It was okay, that voice assured him. He was safe. For just a few seconds, he could let himself feel.

Harkness blanked out completely not long after that, letting go of that last scrap of himself that was keeping his system from freezing. Turning the last few bytes of his processing capacity over to Ted's clever hands as his human tugged every ounce of pleasure out of him that was possible, drawing it out to the point of hypersensitivity.

To the point that he had to grab Ted by the wrist and stop him, in fact, which made Ted laugh inappropriately again.

"God, you're perfect," the human murmured admiringly. Drained to the point of bone-deep exhaustion, Harkness was too tired to correct him.

 


	27. epilogue: may your spirit soar

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> And if the power armor were ready for primetime, he'd bring that too.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> heeeeeeeeeEEEEEEehehehehe
> 
> And so it ends! Thanks so much, everyone, for getting this far and sticking with it. I decided to cut this particular arc off here so that it doesn't drag on forever, but there WILL BE more. I'm 99% sure I'm going to write the adventure in 101, and beyond that there's a few scenes that can work well as oneshots, if not as small chaptered fics of their own. If you liked this and liked the pairing, there's a whole series of more of the same that's just these two and their shenanigans. At this point they're probably my OTP. I'm such a nerd for them.
> 
> http://logicalfangirl.tumblr.com/tagged/ted-davies if you want art, unposted drabbles (just remember that anything that isn't on AO3 isn't solidly canon), and my extra thoughts on the character of Ted; http://logicalfangirl.tumblr.com/tagged/chief-harkness has the same for Harkness.

Harkness looked so damn peaceful.

He was sleeping. Well, Ted figured it was whatever the robot equivalent of sleeping was. Eyes closed, breathing slow. In a weird twist on their established habits, he'd curled up into the crook of Ted's arm like an oversized kitten, leaving Ted to spend the night on his back instead of on his side (which never did good things for his allergies, but disturbing his android almost seemed like a sin at that point).

It was cute. Way cute. Even if Ted's arm was asleep and he felt like someone had laid a bag of cement mix over his sinuses. He held off from snuffling for as long as he could, right up to the point where he couldn't hold it in anymore. As if on cue, his robot's eyes opened at the sound-- big sad blue eyes that made Ted think of innocence and purity and so many other cheesy-ass things that he had to smile.

"Mornin'," he greeted. Those big eyes blinked at him. "Sleep well?"

For a moment Harkness seemed perplexed by the question; then it dawned on him and he chuckled faintly. "If you can call it that."

He scooted a little closer, shifting his head from Ted's arm to his shoulder and chest. Feeling returned to Ted's arm in a prickly rush. Finally.

Still, Harkness didn't seem all that inclined to move beyond that. Once again Ted was drawn to the cat comparison; the robot had found a warm, comfy spot, so he wasn't going to leave it if he didn't have to. Really, Ted would be totally fine with letting him stay there if he weren't seriously in need of a decongestant-- and if he didn't need to go for a piss. Being human was inconvenient as hell, huh?

Even with all that in mind, it was a couple of minutes before Ted said anything. "You're kinda heavy, babe," he remarked.

Harkness blinked. Ted could have sworn that his cheeks turned faintly pink as he pushed himself up. "Right. Sorry."

"Ehh, don't be. You're way too cute for me to hold a grudge about it anyways. " It was awkward, having to shift so that Harkness had room to get out of bed first; the android had been on the side facing the wall, after all. But Harkness was careful and coordinated, far more so than Ted, so it wasn't the tangled mess of limbs it could've been were their positions reversed. No knees ended up smacking into crotches accidentally.

Once he was out of bed, Harkness sort of just... Stood there. Awkwardly trying to look at anything but Ted. He looked like he didn't know what to say, what to do with himself. He probably didn't, to be honest; there was very little so far that he'd actually done without input. Like he was so used to having some sort of mission or assignment that being directionless was completely foreign to him. And Ted knew from experience that the big guy didn't even really know how to ask when he _did_ want something.

Well. They'd have to work on that, huh? "Hey," Ted began, swinging his legs over the side of the bed and sitting up with a congested-sounding sigh. "When I've got my meds, wanna go look for books? Maybe some music holotapes for the jukebox?"

Big eyes flitted back up to stare at him; a tiny smile curved the android's lips as some of the tension melted away. "I'd like that."

"Alright." There. A thing that Harkness wanted. Now if only Ted could work on getting him to ask for it instead of having to suggest it to him. "You said Moira would have them ready today, right?" Harkness nodded. "Okay. If you go get 'em for me, I should be done with all my gross human business by the time you get back."

"You're sure you won't need me here?" Aw, how sweet. Robot was worried.

But it was just the morning routine. Cute as that worry was, Ted was pretty sure he could handle himself. So for the sake of reassurance, he heaved himself up off the bed and stood on tiptoe to give Harkness a quick peck on the lips. "I'll be fine, babe," he said. "I know my limits." Even if standing up so quickly gave him a little bit of a head rush. He'd be okay. He'd dealt with worse bouts of physical weakness.

It took several seconds for Harkness to give in; when he eventually did, he still seemed reluctant. "Okay," he said, frowning. "I won't be gone long."

"Don't rush on my account. I kinda want time to squeeze in a shave." That seemed to trigger something in Harkness's mind, so Ted added, "--which will leave me open to clean you up when you get back, yes. I'll need a good hour before my meds start to work after I take them anyways."

Harkness smirked at that. It was a tentative thing, like it was one of those expressions that still needed some practice before he really got it right. "Can't have rugburn while we're on the road, right?"

Ted blinked for a second before bursting into laughter, shoving at his robot's still-bare chest playfully. "Just put a fucking shirt on and get going, you ass," he said between giggles.

What a good morning.

\---

Gross human business indeed. Even after a quick shower he still went through half a box of tissues trying to get his nose un-clogged, and his throat was starting to feel raw from having to clear it so much. He'd held off as much as he could while Harkness was around - his robot didn't need to be exposed to that sort of unpleasantness - but he just knew that he was going to sound more hoarse than he should by the time the android got back.

He kept the water hot when he shaved, hoping to clear out the congestion as much as he could. Tried not to use too much aftershave, because he was running a little low and he hadn't found another bottle yet. Purposefully avoided thinking too hard on how exhausted the face staring back at him from inside the mirror was. Sat down at his desk upstairs afterward, nail clippers in one hand and pip-boy resting on top of the filing cabinet that doubled as a bureau while he tried to contort himself for the sake of snipping his toenails (which had begun snagging on his socks of late).

When his pip-boy beeped, it startled him so badly that he nearly took some skin off of one of his toes.

"Sonuvva..." he grumbled, rolling his eyes as it beeped at him again. "Alright, alright." Sighing, he stood from his chair and set the clippers down so that he could reach up and get it. "Gimme a sec..."

It didn't, of course. It kept beeping until he slid it halfway over his hand to reassure it that he existed, letting it half-assedly take his pulse and blood pressure. It gave him a warning message that his vitals were way off; probably because he hadn't put it on any further than his knuckles. He ignored it, plopping back into his chair to flick through menus instead and get to whatever it was the obtuse little computer was trying to tell him.

Just when he was thinking about how nice it would be to have a third-party OS on the thing that made it less of a dumb block of circuitry and more accessible - or even something as simple as a slightly newer version of the same OS that made allowances for someone who liked to play with their user interface a bit - he got to the menu that was being snippy, and his thought truncated before it could fully form into a proper notion, cut off by the contents of the alert message.

A new radio broadcast had come into range.

It was the same frequency that the vault kids had used; he'd been out of range the moment the door closed behind him and stopped trying to tune his pip-boy back to it after the first few days or so. He thought of Butch, Freddy, Suzie, _Amata_ \--

He tuned it to the new frequency, feeling like his heart was in his throat. Listened to the message, to Amata's voice. By the end of it his eyes were burning, but he couldn't let himself cry. Wouldn't. He was better than that, alright...? Ah, shit. He owed it to Amata, didn't he? He had to go back. God, she was gonna kill him when she found out about Harkness. And he'd deserve it, too.

But at least Harkness would be happy. Vault 101 was where Ted's books were stashed, and he wasn't about to deny his robot an opportunity to find things to be happy about.

Right, then. Change of plans. As soon as everything was settled in Megaton and Ted's medication had kicked in, they were headed to Vault 101. Where Ted could do what Amata needed him to do and Harkness could find books to read. That was a solid plan, right?

Ehhh. Better bring the plasma rifle anyway, just in case.

 


End file.
